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 Atlanta my friends

like’. The algorithm uses all your friends’ check-ins and ‘likes’

related to restaurants in Atlanta 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

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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 monetization 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

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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 dentists, vets, and most

any other business category. You can

search for positive things like “restau-

rants in London my friends like”, which

will return restaurants in Atlanta 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.

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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

utilizes 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

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STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP

®

®

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.

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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

analyze 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

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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 dollar 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!

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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.

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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.