Last week, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg made his super-secret Facebook announcement unveiling a new function or update. With social media becoming an integral part of a PR pro’s life, many of us were glued to the computer reading the live feed and anxiously awaiting the changes.
Was it going to be new privacy settings? A new messaging tool? No to all of the above. “The Zuck” introduced the Graph Search, a new feature that will allow users to search a topic and then find friends who have shared that type of information. For example, you can search for “friends in Phoenix” and photos of your friends in Phoenix will pop up as results. If your friend has shared information or liked something on Facebook, you will be able to find it via the new search. If someone is searching for a brand, the results depend on a few factors, such as a brand’s information and a friend’s connections with a brand.
How will this affect a PR pro’s work on the site? PR Daily weighs in on the new feature. Social media managers will need to keep brand pages updated with fresh and engaging content as “likes” will once again become more valuable. The more popular a brand page, the more often a page will show up in the Graph Search results.
PR Daily expects there will also be new advertising opportunities from the Graph Search. Down the road, brands may be able to pay to show up higher in results ahead of competition. The opportunity could be similar to Google’s advertising model, in which companies can pay to have their results show up higher than competitors.
Currently, Graph Search is in beta and for English users only, but should be rolling out soon for everyone. What do you think about it? Do you think it will be useful for both personal and professional use?
Source:
http://depthinprblog.com/2013/01/22/pr-primer-facebooks-fresh-function/