One of the more difficult aspects of Facebook up until yesterday was the search capability on the site. Yesterday was a busy day at Facebook as the "FaceFeed" acquisition was put in motion .Under the radar of sorts was this announcement about improvements made in the search capabilities that helps heavy Facebook users considerably and, in particular, marketers.
Let's be honest here. Facebook is like every other social networking / media / engineering marketing site in that it promotes communication and a kind of online hippy mentality. It's all peace, love, everyone getting along and basically knowing way too much about each other. Well folks, let's remind ourselves of one thing about the lovable hippies of the 60's. They went on to become major league capitalists (the ones that could at least feed themselves like Jerry Rubin) and while Facebook may always talk about the user experience what they are most interested in their financial experience. At the end of the day it's a business and who can fault them? The search capabilities help the business of Facebook even more and may help them hit those lofty revenue numbers.
For now though let's imagine that the reason at the top of the Facebook list for improving search is that so everyone can know even more about everyone's stuff and be connected. What you can now do is outlined in the Facebook blog
You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people's profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.
To search for a particular term, just enter your query in the search box in the upper-right corner of any page. Once you're taken to the search results, use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to view only posts by friends or posts by everyone. If you're searching for a specific person, Page, group or application, you also can filter by those results.
Of note is that the web results are powered by bing. As I experimented with the new service it seemed like the occasional 'jumbled' feeling that I get on Facebook is made even worse by a quick brush with TMI (Too Much Information) Syndrome but through the use of filters etc this can be cut down.
As for marketers? The more information the better, right?. This could be particularly helpful to those doing online reputation monitoring work like a certain person we all know here at Marketing Pilgrim.
So have you had a chance to search Facebook for everything about your target market friends yet? What's your thoughts?
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