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Facebook Graph for Local Business

Facebook Graph

At Third Place, we focus on social media platforms that give small businesses the ability to build a community online.  We especially focus on platforms that encourage their online community to come to their business.  Before Facebook Graph, Facebook was a great product to build your online community and enhance your brand presence.  But now, the conversation about your business is even more available to your potential customers.  Here’s how:

Simple Search

Facebook has taken what was a tool used to find friends or pages, and transformed it into an interactive way to discover new places, books, friends, brands, activities, and more.  They made the search tool much more complex than it was, while keeping the user experience insanely simple.  Personally, I never really used the old Facebook search tool unless I knew exactly what I was looking for.  The results were never great, unless I knew I spelled it right, and knew exactly what I was seeking out.  But with Graph, they’ve simplified it to something that automatically detects what you are trying to search for, and gives you suggestions of other interesting ways to use it. 

  As we’ve seen with countless attempts at social media applications and platforms, the simplified products win.  Confuse your users and make them click extra steps to get to the good stuff, and you’re dead. 

  Cross-Referenced Search

When it comes to local businesses, this is where it gets good.   One example is “Bars my friends like”.  Never before could you get a useful aggregate of pages your friends are interested in.  Other social platforms have this tool to an extent, but no platform has as much user-traction with pages as Facebook does.  The extent of cross referencing is huge, from the simple reference above, all the way to: “Pages my friends like that also like Indian food and like [insert Indian restaurant] that have been to India”.  Talk about specific! 

  Location Centric

The old Facebook search was in very few ways location-centric.  Now, with Graph, Facebook references where the pages you currently like are, and if you allow it, where you currently are.  The beta has not hit mobile (as far as we know), but when it does, it could get fun. 

  Increasing “Likes”

When this beta product hits and all users switch over, I’m predicting that many local businesses will see a 10-15% higher boost in their likes than what they are currently seeing.  The likes will level out after people are done playing around with it.  But in my experience thus far, the new algorithms do a great job at predicting what business you want to like, therefore creating much more exposure for your business page. 

  Stay tuned as we evaluate more of the Graph, and understand how it works and what we can do to help the Graph impact your business. 

  Cheers,

David Stewart

Director of Business and Technology

Third Place – a social media company