Facebook search is a game changer

Facebook have just rolled out their new version of real-time search, previously only being tested on select accounts, across the whole platform. In short – it is a game changer.

Whereas the previous facebook search functionality allowed you to view people, pages, groups and applications, the new function now allows you to search through peoples’ status updates. Regardless of whether they’re your friend or not (though they do need to have allowed their updates to be viewed publicly). You can also further filter these results by ‘notes’ ‘status updates and wall posts’ or ‘links’. This means a huge change for the way people can manage groups and business pages, and has inevitably opened up the way for some heavy spamming.

Previously, the opportunities for promoting your page/group within Facebook itself were fairly limited. You could run demographically targeted ads pointing to the page, or promote your group within other groups. But unless you already knew of a particular individual you wanted to engage with, you had no real way of targeting people within Facebook (for free) based on their interests. Facebook search has changed that. Run a search on ‘night out Dublin’ for example and you are faced with a list of results, including individual status updates, which a bar or club would be well positioned to capitalise on.

Facebook search is a game changer because of the numbers involved. It is hitting Twitter right where it hurts, into the microblogging site’s main functionality : the ability to see (and search) what people are saying. The opportunities on Facebook were always bigger – over 122 million uniques on Facebook, compared to just over 23 million for Twitter.

Now that Facebook offers real time search, I predict a lot more companies growing their communities through this mainstream platform.