How many of you have noticed the increase in advertisements in your Facebook news feeds? How many of you like the increased advertisements? I’m going to venture to say not many of us.
As many of you may recall, Facebook was not the first big social networking site. MySpace was the market share holder prior to Facebook. However many users made the switch to Facebook from MySpace when their user experience became cluttered with banners and pop ups. Facebook needs to be careful not to fall into the same trap.
While our Facebook experience has more advertisements, I believe Zuckerberg is walking a fine line and he’s careful not to cross it. Facebook is generating revenue by selling space on your newsfeed and profile. The ads delivered to you are highly customized banners based on our personal data. We are not yet bombarded with banners which become as annoying as neon signs and I don’t believe we will be.
I’m hoping Facebook will take advantage of the massive and unique opportunity to take over another market leader and create a user experience larger than the sum of its parts. I’m talking about Facebook taking over Google’s market share by becoming the next search engine.
In order to understand how this would work, let’s first do a quick summary of how Google delivers results to you. There are 2 ways Google’s algorithm works to deliver the free/organic search results.
1) Keywords and Phrases. Websites have words and phrases in each page and each page of a website is the opportunity to rank for a new and different keyword/phrase. Google looks in specific places on each page for those words or phrase to determine if that page should come up in the free/organic search results for that word or phrase.
2) Inbound Links. An inbound link is another website linking to the website in question. Let’s say two different websites had the same exact words/phrase in all the right places, Google then prioritizes by which of those websites has more inbound links.
Now let’s think about the data Facebook knows about you. They know who you are, where you went to school, where you work, who your friends are, where your friends have eaten for dinner and heck even what they ordered sometimes. Every time someone from your network “likes” a business page, “shares” something or “checks in” somewhere, consider this a recommendation or a referral. Word of mouth if you will.
So where is the opportunity for Facebook to take over Google? This means Facebook can deliver results that are exponentially more relevant and personal than Google ever can deliver. Instead of delivering results based on keywords and inbound links, Facebook can deliver results based keywords in addition to:
1) Who you are (your personal data).
2) Word of mouth recommendations (likes, shares, etc).
As an example, let's say you Google and look for "restaurants in London". Your first result will be the restaurant that has either paid an SEO firm a lot of money to get to the top or has been around a long time. Now compare that to getting results based upon restaurants in London your friends, colleagues or family have been to. The more “likes” or “checks in” a restaurant receives, the more search results it will appear in.
Take a look at the screenshot below I was able to grab from Facebook's graph search. Look at the blue bar above the picture on the left which reads “restuarants in London my friends have been to”.
Wondering how this will affect sales? First, your prospects are online doing research even if you’re a B2B company. If you don’t believe they do their research online – stop reading this article. I’ve already confused you and you’re so far behind you need to go figure out how to turn your computer on.
Your prospects are using Google to research services and how to solve their challenges. Use the screen shot below and replace the word “restaurant” let’s say with something like “warehouse management services”. Also think about how many times you've received a word of mouth recommendation or referral from an existing customer.
If Facebook becomes the next search engine, delivering results based upon keywords and word of mouth, you better hope your company has a good social media presence.
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