Facebook’s Graph Search Launched Share

Facebook have recently released a beta version of their “third pillar” – Graph Search. The other two core pillars – news feed and timeline – have both been transformed significantly over the last two years. Essentially, Graph Search is a search tool that allows you to easily find friends who share similar interests – recommendations, music they’ve listed to, restaurants they’ve eaten at and so on.

The launch of Graph Search is quite timely – Facebook hadn’t made any major change or significant launch in some time. This together with the fact that the useful information Facebook stores about your relationship with friends was never very accessible at all.

It’s now common knowledge – social media is about peer recommendations for businesses. If you see your friend has liked a business page, you’re far more inclined to use this business and its credibility is therefore boosted. What this now allows is convenient access to any peer recommendation.

For instance, one can now search for “Dentists my friends like” using Graph Search. This information was never at all accessible. It existed, yes. But it was hidden beneath layers of other information. One would only ever stumble across it, and not search it.

Jon Thomas at postadvertising.com says, “what Google is to the web, Graph Search is to your social network on Facebook”. This is a great outcome for businesses, especially those who are active on Facebook. Ultimately, there is now another path to stumble across their page and, better yet, it’s based on a peer recommendation. We’ll monitor the success of the beta launch and report back with our findings in the near future.