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2 Designing with Grids
HOW CONTENT AND THE VALUE OF THE ‘LIKE’ WILL AFFECT RESULTS
IN GRAPH SEARCH
HOW CONTENT AND THE VALUE OF THE ‘LIKE’ WILL AFFECT RESULTS
IN GRAPH SEARCH
FACEBOOK SEARCH
3 Designing with Grids2
Facebook Graph Search is the search engine inside Facebook.
You can use it to find photos, restaurants, places, and new and
old friends. It works by joining up all the different data points
you and all your friends have entered into Facebook and return-
ing relevant results based on how they are all connected. For
example, you can search for ‘restaurants in London my friends
like’. The algorithm uses all your friends’ check-ins and ‘likes’ re-
lated to restaurants in London to give you a list of restaurants
that, if you can trust your friends, you’ll like too.
This work explores the notion that SEO for Graph Search will
be a battleground for companies and brands vying for the top
spot in search results just like in Google.
However, there will be a difference in how Facebook deter-
mines which company, brand, or piece of content ranks better
than others. I propose that each individual and brand on Face-
book will have an authority score, similar to Klout®. This ulti-
mately will mean that the value of each person’s like, or opinion,
will vary.
Brands, companies, and individuals will then be judged based
on the quality of their fan base, and by extension, the quality
of the friends of each of their fans. How qualified a fan is will
reflect how relevant the fan’s interests, personal details, such
as education and place of work, and Facebook connections are
to the brand.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
4 Designing with Grids
Facebook Graph Search
(GS) rolled out to all Eng-
lish speakers in the US in
August 2013. It uses the
details of your profile
and the details of all your
friends’ profiles to make
finding photos, places,
and things easier within
Facebook. Facebook has
an ever-growing wealth of
personal content. Its motivation to make
it sortable and findable is intuitive. Im-
proving the user experience on Facebook
means people will spend more time. If at
the same time, Facebook can start taking
market share from traditional search en-
gines and review sites, it’ll reap the ben-
efits of the ad revenue that comes with it.
The social giant is smartly taking a con-
servative approach to global rollout
as it understandably has not only a
number of kinks to work out, but also
needs to spend time defining what
Graph Search will ultimately become.
For now, Graph Search {Engine} Re-
sults Pages (GSERPs) show unsurpris-
ing results: the content for which you
have searched. The interesting part is
thinking about what GS will become,
particularly within the domain of con-
tent in GSERPs. For brands and market-
ers, it will be about what the actions are
that are needed to rank well in GS in
order to increase visibility of their con-
tent and deepen brand engagement.
For Facebook, it’s about providing a
useful utility with which paid advertis-
ing can seamlessly integrate. Facebook
has shareholders and stock price to
worry about, so it will be no surprise
when monetisation emerges within GS.
Find restaurants, music,
photos, activities, and meet
new friends all through
people you already know.
The search engine in
Facebook, called Graph
Search, makes this possible
3
FACEbook GRAph SEARCh: WhAT IS IT And WhERE’S IT hEAdEd?
By Adam Westin, Associate Director, Head of Search, Edelman UK
Follow on Twitter: @adwestin Add on Google+ Find on Linkedin
Graph Search results
for movie searches
are fairly basic; a
literal list of movie
titles ranked based
your friends’ ‘likes’.
5 Designing with Grids
At the present time, the content for
brands/companies shown in GSERPs is
pretty narrow in focus and feels a bit
like Yelp®, which is an urban reviews
site with recommendations by locals
for restaurants, shopping, and activi-
ties. The current search results are fairly
ridged in that customised content from
brands, or anyone for that matter, isn’t
included. For example, you can search
for ‘movies my friends like’ and the re-
sults are just a list of FB pages for each
of those movies. There’s not yet any vid-
eo trailer content, no IMDb write-up, or
anything else beyond just movie pages.
But again, Facebook is focusing on util-
ity and relevance of the results first and
foremost, so it’s naturally taking its time.
Recommendations from people you
trust, a.k.a. your friends
Speaking of utility, one of the most
common use cases is searching for
restaurants your friends have been to
(checked in), or recommended (liked
the company FB page). The same con-
cept applies to dry cleaners, vets, and
most any other business category. You
can search for positive things like “res-
taurants in London my friends like”,
which will return restaurants in London
that your friends like. No surprise there.
However, GS won’t give a result for
negative searches, such as “restaurants
in atlanta my friends hate.” Instead,
you’re given a Bing search result com-
plete with related search suggestions
and paid search ads. Facebook may
choose to entertain including results
in GS for negative queries, especially
where relevant to reviews and recom-
mendations for restaurants, stores,
bars, etc., but for the moment, just as
it doesn’t have a “Don’t Like” button,
it’s opting to stay positive and happy.
4
ConTEnT CURREnTlY pRESEnT In FACEbook GRAph SEARCh
6 Designing with Grids
In any case, GS is still in its infancy. The
output is limited to a certain set of query
parameters and by the details of your con-
nections. This won’t always be the case,
though. With an eye on revenue generation,
Facebook will find a way to start integrating
other content within the GSERPs. The trick
will be to be able to do so while still putting
the user experience first. Relevance for the
user is going to be the single most impor-
tant factor in making GS a success, which
will be judged by user adoption. To this end,
Facebook is being smart with how it’s feel-
ing out what GS will ultimately become. The
current utility focuses on usability and func-
tionality. It provides something that users
can get from nowhere else. From a reviews
and recommendations perspective, this
means advice from people users know and
trust. From a data management perspec-
tive, it’s a way to conveniently sort all the
content, primarily photos, based on your
connections, locations, etc. For Facebook,
the key will be figuring out how to expand
the scope of content that is served up in
the search results, while still maintaining
relevance.
Exactly how Facebook will start blend-
ing in content from brands remains to be
seen, but rest assured it will happen. With
that will come the inevitable clamor among
brands to rank at the top of the results for
given searches. The route to the top is easy
in concept: unique, relevant content. The
winners will be those brands that figure out
what their audience wants, and gives it to
them.
Let’s establish a key parameter first,
though. Facebook isn’t trying to replicate
Google, at least not
yet. Google indexes
the entire web,
while Facebook
uses data people
have entered and
the relationships
therein. Facebook
doesn’t need to
provide the answers to all things, just
answers to some of the things people
care most about. The result is an imme-
diate threat to sites like Yelp® and Open
Table® for reviews and recommendations.
Looking forward, it this will also be a threat
to search engines for market share of
long-tail searches, which are searches
that contain multiple keywords. Consider
the following example in the figure below:
In the short term, Graph Search
is a threat to review sites. In
the future, it will be a threat
to search engines for market
share of long-tail searches
5
STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP
®
®
LONDON
CURREnT WAY oF SEARChInG:
Think about how impactful it would be
if Facebook could give relevant, real-time
answers to this type of question. Google
would lose those types of searches over-
night. Facebook GS can’t give the full result
just yet for the above query, but it will in the
future. The implications this has for all brick
and mortar locations are huge. Companies
will need to ensure they provide Facebook
with all the information that customers
would factor into a purchase decision. From
our Italian example above, this would include
seating capacity, real-time reservation avail-
ability, operating hours, restaurant genre,
and location.
From a tactical perspective, this would mean
that just like fully filling out Google+ and Bing
Local profiles, owners will need to ensure
technical site markup like Open Graph tags
and schema.org are included in their site
coding. These act as behind-the-scenes
signposts to search engines and Facebook
to help them recognise things like an address
in the contact us section of a website. This
helps take out some of the guesswork on the
part of the engines by telling them explicitly
how to treat the information contained in
address tags, or phone number tags, etc.,
and display it properly to consumers. For
Facebook to get to the point where it can
confidently answer Bob’s Italian restaurant
query, the social giant is going to need a lot
of help from brands in the site markup arena,
but what this does is present an opportunity
for those brands and companies that are
quick to act, as they will be the ones to reap
the rankings rewards.
Local profile info is a no-brainer, but what
about content creation going forward?
Content strategies are obviously unique
to each business or brand. If done cor-
rectly, they are based on audience and
search behavior insight and should reso-
nate with the target market in such a way
that the actions produced align with the
brand’s business objectives. That’s a long-
winded way of saying connect with the
right customers, in the right way, so that
they benefit and so does the brand.
This concept is not novel. People want
content they find useful, be it informa-
tive or entertaining. The key question is
how will Facebook decide what content
is most relevant? Beyond keyword and
technical context it can infer from a piece
of content, Facebook will look at several
main factors for ranking search results, as
explained in the sections to follow.
6
FUTURE WAY oF SEARChInG:
STEP
ConTEnT CREATIon FoR GRAph SEARCh In ThE FUTURE
Facebook profile
fields will get more
granular. Expect
to be able to fill in
things like make/
model of your
car and the breed
of dog you own.
The result is a
marketer’s dream.
It’s no secret that people share an incredible amount of personal
information on Facebook and other social networks already. We
all know far too much about people’s coffee drinks, their babies
eating schedules, and status updates that start out like this: “To
the guy in front of me in line at the checkout…” The point is, we
should expect the level of granularity in person-
al profiles to expand. Not only will you be able
to fill in that you live in a certain city, work at a
certain company, and you have 3 siblings, (and
here are links to their profiles), but you’ll also be
able to fill in the fact that you drive a black BMW
or have a golden retriever for a pet. Think about
what this means in terms of targeting for a Mer-
cedes dealership or a company that makes dog
food. They literally will know who their audience is. This is relevant
as a ranking factor because it will allow Facebook to dissect and
analyse who is engaging with a certain piece of content. Using the
dog food brand example, what this means is that 100 likes from
dog owners on a dog video will mean more to the brand in terms of
building authority than 100 likes on the same video by cat owners.
pERSonAl pRoFIlES WIll EXpAnd To InClUdE MoRE GRAnUlAR dATA
To build authority on
Facebook, a dog food brand
should seek to acquire not
just any fan, but fans who
are actual dog owners
7
Right now, all our ‘likes’ are counted equally. A teenager’s like on
a brand’s fan page carries the exact same weight as the CEO of a
billion pound company in terms of determining the popularity and
value of the brand on Facebook. However, for the brand, raw fan
count paints a skewed picture of its audience because depend-
ing on the brand and its target audience, it may actually value the
teenager’s ‘like’ over the CEO’s, or vice versa. In the future within
Facebook, this will likely change. Facebook will use your connec-
tions, data, and information from other social profiles (which we
will willingly provide because that’s just what we do) to create a
Klout®-type evaluation of each person’s profile. Each person’s ‘like’,
or comment, will carry a different weight. However, it will be more
robust than Klout® because it will be able to understand not only
that you have authority, but that you have it in certain areas and not
others. Effectively, your opinion (your ‘like’), will vary in importance
depending on your relationship with the content with which you are
engaging and the people in your social profile. In turn, each of us,
and brands, will be judged by the quality of the company we keep.
To that end, content will be judged based
on the authority of the producer of the con-
tent, be it brand or an individual author. It
will be valued using a number of factors, but
primarily on follower profile. Brands with a
higher number of qualified fans will have a
higher authority than competitors, all else
being equal. What defines a qualified fan
will be different for every single brand! So, if
two brands have the exact same followers, the brand for which the
follower profile is more relevant would be given a higher authority
score in Facebook’s eyes. What this means is that the value a person’s
‘like’ contributes to the fan profile for company A is different than
the value that same person’s ‘like’ gives to company B’s fan profile.
EACh pERSon’S lIkE WIll bE VAlUEd dIFFEREnTlY
Consider the following example of how the power of each per-
son’s ‘like’ will vary: John is an avid coin collector. He lists ‘coin
collection’ and ‘rare coins’ under his interests in his profile. He
works at Rare Coins, Inc., also in his profile. Many of his friends
on FB also are interested in coin collection. To Facebook, John
is seen as having a certain level of authority about coins. There-
fore, when John ‘likes’ the fan page of Coin Collectors Monthly,
his ‘like’ contributes more ranking authority to the page than an
average like. By the same token though, if John were to like a fan
page for a helicopter manufacturer, being that he’s not an expert
in helicopters, his ranking authority contribution to that page
would not be as significant.
brands will be judged based on
quality of their fan profiles and
the extent to which the fans
engagement with their content.
What defines a qualified fan will
be different for every single brand!
8
10 Designing with Grids
What this means for brands is that similar to how Google judg-
es part of a website’s authority by looking at the value of links
pointing to that site from others (quality over quantity), Face-
book will start looking at the quality of fans a brand has and how
engaged they are with the Page’s content. Note that amplifying
content with paid media will continue to play a pivotal role in
consistently reaching the right fans with the right message to
keep them engaged. That said, factors by which fan profiles will
be judged will include, among other things:
For brands seeking to build their authority on Facebook and
rank well in Graph Search, targeted influencer outreach activi-
ties will increase. This will be so much more than just tradition-
al influencer identification because we’re no longer just dealing
with trying to acquire a single person. Instead, brands must
consider the implications of the social connections of that in-
fluencer. The social profile of each person will serve as valida-
tion for that person’s influence and authority and will be the
measure of whether that person is truly relevant to the brand.
Conveniently, this is also how Facebook will keep people from
trying to game the system by buying ‘likes’ because you can’t
easily fake a legitimate social profile.
In summary, doing well in Graph Search will require brands to
focus not only on creating quality, relevant content, but also
to commit to acquiring the right type of fan. The two concepts
go hand in hand, as qualified fans will be attracted to strong
content. The best course of action is to forget about trying to
rank well and instead just focus on providing customers with
what they want. High rankings will be a natural byproduct.
9
How influential/authoritative they are (e.g. celebrity
status) with respect to the target audience
Interests, hobbies, etc. which are relevant to the
brand brand
Who their social connections are and what relevant
interests their friends have
Where they live and work and where they went
to school
By Adam Westin, Associate Director, Head of Search, Edelman UK
Follow on Twitter: @adwestin Add on Google+ Find on Linkedin
WhAT doES ThIS MEAn FoR bRAndS?
by Adam Westin, Associate director, head of Search, Edelman Uk
Follow on Twitter: @adwestin Add on Google+ Find on linkedin
Adam leads Edelman’s search practice in Europe, focusing on
driving real results with ROI-driven strategic thinking and
insights-led content creation.