Facebook Takes Another Step to Compete in Search

Facebook announced late last week the addition of personal search history to the Activity Log, allowing users to view and delete previous searches.

The seemingly innocuous change hints at Facebook’s plans to enter the search realm, as promised by founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month.

“Search engines are really evolving toward giving you a set of answers,” he told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt. “It’s not just like ‘I’ll type in something and show me some relevant stuff.’ It’s, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.’ When you look at it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have: ‘What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the past six months and liked?’ ‘Which of my friends and friends of friends work at this company I’m interested in … so I can talk to them about what it’s like to work there?’”

Analysts have awaited a move by Facebook into the realm of web search since the reigning leader, Google, announced its own social platform. Both are in the position to collect massive amounts of social data and employ it in personalized web searches, though each are starting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Google has long dominated web search and only in the past year has begun personalizing search using higher intent social data with Search Plus Your World. Facebook, on the other hand, grew into the largest single source of social data and are now beginning to act on their interest to compete in web search and the lucrative ads industry (outside of their own space).

They’ve been experimenting with features within the Facebook platform that Google has already mastered on the web, like the real-time search ads API they rolled out in August. This summer also saw the launch of Facebook’s real-time bidding and retargeting capabilities.

The addition of personal search history to the Activity Log is another step forward for Facebook in their quest to steal a piece of the search marketing pie from Google and current competitors. Zuckerberg’s appearance at TC Disrupt left little to debate as to whether or not search is part of their grander plan. He told interviewers of search, “...at some point we’ll do it…. That’s one obvious thing that would be interesting for us to do in the future.”

To access personal search history, go to the Activity Log and click on “Search” in the activity sorter (the activity sorter is a dropdown menu with “All” as the default label for the button). Facebook reminds users that no one else can see their search history; this is private, between the user and Facebook. Search history looks like this:

 

The new search history feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.

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Why Facebook Search Will Make a Lot of Money...and Be Completely Ineffective

Inspiration for writing columns comes from many places. Sometimes it's from timely news surrounding companies or new research, and sometimes it's from something completely benign, like a horse head mask for sale on Amazon.

On Black Friday, one of the fine employees in the office posted that horse head mask on Facebook as his pick of the day for best deal online. As is the case with Facebook and inane items, a few people liked his post and a couple more commented - and suddenly it became a Facebook Sponsored Story being shared with his network. (You can tell he's a search expert by the witty pun in the copy.) In this model, Amazon is paying for the push of a horse head mask. I'm going to leave the ROI calculation of that alone for the moment.

Instead, let's think about how Facebook Search might evolve the model, generate a boatload of cash, and still be largely useless to consumers and brands.

Why Facebook Search?

Money. Next question.

Why Would Users Benefit From Facebook Search?

Think about the sheer volume of questions being asked by individuals on a daily basis to their Facebook network, and think about the potential of marrying that hand-raising with more informed responses. For example, you want guidance on the right car or diaper to buy, and your network, via association with brands, surfaces "liked" choices. Or you enter a query into the oft forgotten Facebook toolbar and it would return to you not only people and pages, but ads. There are forms of this already in play with Sponsored Stories, but the explicit association is the next step and could be beneficial to all…maybe.

What Prevents Facebook Search From Working?

There is a mindset around social search that suggests that your friends are highly influential to your decision-making. That's why you ask for their opinions in the first place. If you go to Facebook versus a comparison shopping engine for reviews, you are prioritizing your network over a network of random opinions. This is why Sponsored Stories include the friend that liked the horse head mask over a standard ad.

But, is your network better than a comparison audience? Facebook is built on the social graph of your friends. The wisdom of that crowd is skewed based on how they became "friends" in the Facebook sense. Most Facebook friends are high school, college, and work connections, which means they may not have opinions worth considering on many topics of interest to me. On a one-off basis, sure, but does knowing two of my friends like a car brand constitute an endorsement worthy of action?

Social search starts with that base, a social network. To steal a concept from Google, it's not a circle of enthusiasts around a given topic that I am searching for opinions from. Google works in no small part because it is able to algorithmically decipher what is most relevant based on my query. For Facebook Search to work it needs a much heavier dosage of interest graph or it needs to properly align with a true search engine that makes the basis of the process search, and then layers in seamlessly the social component it does so well today.

Anything else and it's a bit "cart before the horse," with brands and consumers in search of horse head masks and other queries to feel like the horse's rear instead.

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Facebook Graph Search Taps People Power

This week Facebook announced its new search functionality, "Graph Search," using Bing to power the PPC element for the Facebook search engine result page (SERP). Since the majority of you probably have a robust, well-tested campaign live in Bing adCenter already, you'll be somewhat prepared to test the advertising clicks coming out of Facebook. However, the announcement is still very important because, if the new Facebook search functionality takes off, you may have to maintain a completely different set of keywords and strategies for Bing because of its Facebook integration.

Facebook and social networks in general are about people. People contain information, expertise, and knowledge. Traditional search engines are evolving and although the introduction of rel="author" and heavy use of Google+ are adding an element of knowledge to information, Google looks at relevance signals and calculates personalized relevance of results based on its set of algorithms, which more recently have taken into account its own version of the social graph (Google+).

How Graph Search Works

Facebook has a completely different set of information from a completely different set of users. The concept behind tapping knowledge or leading searchers to the individual that has the knowledge you seek is not new to the Internet. Quora, Yahoo's Q&A, Answers.com, eHow.com, LinkedIn's Q&A, as well as LinkedIn's endorsements, plus many other sites, all attempt to get individuals to share enough information or knowledge that an algorithm can rank them with regard to expertise and knowledge by topic. Facebook takes it a step further because it has more "signal," particularly with heavy users. In addition to knowing what you've written, or commented on, Facebook shows what you like, how much you like it, and if you've shared information on a specific topic. Facebook has indicated that the primary focus in its currently launching "Graph Search" is people, photos, places, and interests. All of these can, of course, lead to detailed knowledge about the user.

Facebook sees your behavior and that of other Facebook members every time you visit a page that contains a Facebook like button, regardless of whether you like the page/site or not. It will be interesting to see if this information will be used to flesh out your relevance to your friends' searches on Facebook for specific topics. For example, you may visit a lot of boating sites and never "like" any of them. You are still probably a great person to return in the results. But there are privacy issues because you never specifically told Facebook about your boating passion.

Unanswered Questions for Search Marketers

The personalization element of Facebook's SERP is far beyond what Google is accomplishing with Google+ integration because of the presence of greater data on member likes and greater user penetration. The unanswered questions for us as search marketers are:

How much search volume could show up in the Bing-powered Facebook as a result of Facebook user adoption?How will search queries and keyword use differ when consumers are searching their social network's history, knowledge, and expertise?How will conversion rates on Facebook referral traffic differ from traditional search?Should traffic originating from a social search be treated differently, and should personalized landing pages be deployed that resemble your brand's Facebook presence more than they do a typical website?Will Bing allow for Facebook search traffic to be:Turned off?Bid separately?Directed to an alternate Facebook URL?Should we handle "brand searches" differently in a social search environment compared to traditional search?

There are additional questions relating to a brand's organic SEO component. For example, if your brand is well liked, there might be an increased likelihood that your brand shows up in a Facebook SERP because the folks the searcher is friends with might be interacting and engaging with your content.

Risks for Facebook (Avoiding a SERP That Sucks)

The biggest risk to Facebook is that consumers start using the Graph Search to do search queries that are not appropriate for that kind of search engine algorithm. The resulting SERP might suck. Even in cases where the search query should be appropriate for Graph Search, the result might cause a SERP that sucks if:

The person doing the search has too few friends.The query is obtuse or very narrow: "How many of my friends like extra salt on their French fries?"The friends of the searcher (or Facebook members as a whole) have extremely sparse profiles: "Who do I know that works at a Chase?"The question is asked in a way that requires a knowledge graph as well: "Who do I know that works at a bank?" Facebook needs to know all the banks.

At this point there is a lot of hype around Graph Search. Time will tell if it's warranted. This development does, however, raise the possibility that LinkedIn (which has much more complete profile information) might serve as an alternate place to deploy a cool graph search functionality.

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PPC for B2B on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers have always had challenges in online (and offline) marketing that consumer marketers don't share. Even within search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) - where the search intent is really strong and the signal with regard to the desires of the searcher are clear - it's not always easy to set up and optimize a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Some of the existing challenges that B2B marketers face in paid search are further multiplied as the marketer expands CPC advertising over to the social media side of the ecosystem.

B2B online marketers have several unique marketing challenges that differ from those of firms with consumer-focused products or services. In PPC search, the keywords used by consumers and business buyers are often identical, and even day-parting and geo-targeting only increase the odds that you will have a business searcher on the hook for critical keywords. Some of the audience-targeting challenges faced by B2B marketers have been mitigated by new PPC- and CPM-based display and text link products that integrate well into a SEM PPC campaign. Contextual targeting at the domain or page level can improve targeting and makes the Google Display Network (GDN) a great adjunct to paid search. Behavioral targeting uses cookies (retargeting or third-party cookies) and helps a B2B campaign gain scale.

As we move into social media, the additional targeting options available within LinkedIn and Facebook can provide benefits that search marketing alone can't deliver, but there are tradeoffs, including losing the comforting keyword list you've used for targeting within search. Social media targeting is based on the person, her profile, and internal behavior (within the social network). Display ad retargeting and use of display advertising against behavioral cookie pools is another great supplement to PPC search for the B2B advertiser.

Multiple Decision-Makers and Influencers

B2B marketers are often faced with a sales process that involves multiple decision-makers and even additional influencers. Not only does this pose a problem with tracking (assuming there is a conversion event on the site), but a messaging challenge exists as well. In paid and organic search, the keywords in use by prospect decision-makers and influencers are usually similar, if not the same. Therefore, if your optimal messaging is different, and varies with the title or job description of the search visitor, one must address it with landing pages that separate or bifurcate the user based on self-selection. For example, your landing page might include a path for case studies; a path for features, benefits, and attributes; and a third path for pricing information.

In social media, we can sometimes select an audience with sufficient precision to send that user to the most appropriate landing page given her title and role in the business buying cycle. For example, in LinkedIn we have the following targeting parameters that may give us significant insight into the role of the individual in the buying process for B2B services or products:

Location - please specify at least one locationCompanySelect companies by nameSelect categories of companiesJob titleJob titleJob function and/or senioritySchoolSkillsGroupGenderAge

The intersection of company and job title or role creates a very small pool of ad viewers, and one has to remember that many folks with LinkedIn profiles are not particularly active within LinkedIn, so if you know exactly who you'd like to target (by name), consider using LinkedIn InMails to reach out to the target audience directly. In LinkedIn and social media in general, the line between marketing and sales becomes blurry.

How important is a specific prospect? If she is extra valuable as a customer, then a multi-pronged sales and marketing effort may be warranted with company-specific targeting along with job title or job function. Plus, I recommend that if you use LinkedIn, treat the influencers differently than the final decision-makers. They respond to different messages and have different needs as buyers.

The same holds true for Facebook. Facebook has some overlap with its targeting options, but the problem with Facebook is that often the employer data is not filled out in profiles, and even when it is, the profiles aren't of senior business people. In addition, you'll have to use likes and interests as a proxy for targeting businesspeople.

Twitter ad targeting for non-self-serve accounts is keyword-based, so think about keywords in a new way. Are there Twitter discussions that are highly likely to be occurring among your prospects? If not, then once again Twitter may be more of a way to identify prospects by name and allow for the beginning of a conversation.

Image on home page via Shutterstock.

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