On the 15th of January, Facebook announced its top-secret product, Graph Search, a new natural-language search. The feature allows users to search for information about their friends’ interests, contacts, photos, and much more. If it cannot be found on Facebook, the search is then sent out to Bing. For example, you can search for “Friends who like Appleton Creative,” and automatically see a list of people with great advertising taste.
Here are some pros and cons of this new product:
PROS
Connectivity: More opportunities for people to connect to one another on a deeper level through social media are realized. Businesses could use it to find, recruit, or check-on current or potential employees. Users could search for common interests. Childhood friends can reconnect through shared photos.
Privacy: The only information that would be viewable through searches is the information that is made public or viewable to your friend list. Our suggestion is to check your privacy settings now before the changes are available to all Facebook users.
Humanity in Technology: It adds a human touch to technology that could change search engines in social media websites such as LinkedIn, Yelp, Flickr, and etc.
CONS
Too Much Information (TMI): It could become even harder to separate personal and professional lives on social media networks. Anyone could search for similar interests and find your postings.
Stalking: Just as easily as you can search for people and images, others can too. This means that your ex might start to spy on your life as well. (This could be good or bad.)
It is only available on desktop and specific markets for now. It may expand nationally soon.
Graph Search is an innovative software feature for Facebook with great potential. For business, it could expand opportunities for businesses to expose themselves to a specifically targeted market with similar interests. We are excited to see where this new technology will lead in other search engines in the future.
We just love social media. It could be a very useful tool for marketing your business. Feel free to contact us! Appleton Creative is an award-winning, full-service advertising agency located in Orlando, Florida. Appleton works with local, national and international clients to provide marketing strategies through print, web, social media and video production – all in house. At Appleton, we want to learn about your business, empower your marketing team and be your creative resource. Your marketing goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com.
