Yesterday Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled the next big step in the social network’s development.  Soon Facebook users will be able the search within the walled garden for things their friends like, places they’ve been, and pictures they’ve posted.  Currently users can add themselves to a wait list to get this first iteration of search, so it’s not available for use just yet.

 

This does, however, cause traditional SEO and Social to come colliding into each other when it comes to your business presence on Facebook.  After all, what kinds of things can your friends “like?”  Or more importantly, how many of any given user’s friends “like” your business on Facebook?  Right now you have a golden opportunity to give your business page a tune up before English speaking Facebook users start searching.

According to facebook-studio.com:

Here’s how Graph Search works:

• The search bar first returns the top search suggestions, including people, Pages, apps, places, groups, and suggested searches. People can search for things like restaurants near them, hotels in places they want to travel to, photos posted by Pages they like, or games that their friends like to play.
• These search suggestions take people to a unique results page. The results returned are based on factors that include information that has been shared by your business and the connections of the person searching.
• As has been the case for some time, we may also make search suggestions in the search bar that then can trigger web searches. Web searches will display Bing results and Bing ads, similar to results on Bing.com.
• Pages and apps can still use sponsored results, which appear to people whether or not they have Graph Search (sponsored results have been globally available since August 2012). There are no new ad formats available today.

There are several things to keep in mind as you set your page up for search success.

Howard Lo shares some great tips in his article for zdnet.com

• Number of likes becomes more important–since search will begin with people connected to Pages, the more people liking your Page means more people connected and thus the higher frequency of showing in search results.
• Fill out Page fields properly–for your business Page, ensure each field is filled out with the relevant, properly-formatted information. Don’t try to create your own sub-category, follow the standards. Don’t put text into phone number fields. Facebook should be pulling lots of data from these fields.
• For the open-ended text in description fields, write copy that includes keywords, as if you’re writing copy for Google to “crawl”.
• Tag your photos with locations, such as your business, and dates–I wonder if there is opportunity here to somehow create searchable product catalogs.
• Tag your photos with a Page name (for example, my business Page is “Standing Sushi Bar”)–Assuming Facebook treats a photo where Standing Sushi Bar is tagged similarly to how it treats a tagged human, then “Show me photos of Standing Sushi Bar” would show photos tagged with Standing Sushi Bar. Slightly different than tagging location.

Over the course of the next few weeks we will be digging deeper into what this significant change means for your content, engagement, advertising considerations and much more for your Facebook business presence.  What questions do you need addressed right away?

 

via searchenginejournal.com