Facebook’s Graph Search feature will now include results from even more types of posts, including public status updates, photo captions, check-ins and comments.
The updates were announced by Facebook yesterday, who said the new features were “rolling out slowly to a small group of people who currently have Graph Search and we will continue to improve this experience by listening to feedback.”
Previously, Graph Search only returned results from user profiles, such as where they live, their likes and their occupations. With te expanded search capability, users can tap into real time activity on Facebook. Much like performing a topic search on Twitter, users can search for what other Facebookers are saying about a news event, a TV show or a general trending topic.
This means marketers have an opportunity to monitor the real time results of their efforts on Facebook. They can perform a search to see exactly who is talking about their products, watching the TV shows they are sponsoring or consuming the content they are distributing. This opens up a huge amount of vital data to advertisers, not to mention direct sales opportunities. It can also help them identify influencers on the platform, and target them to become brand evangelists.
Although Facebook says the results that’ll show up in Graph Search will only mine your own contacts and public posts by other people, that is still a significant amount of data at your hand, especially for getting a quick temperature reading. Plus, there’s plenty of people who still haven’t figured out how to make their posts private (not that Facebook makes it easy to do that.)
