The toughest nut to crack in any marketing medium on the web is segmenting your audience into manageable chunks. If you know who your target audience is, you can cater to them far more easily. The new Facebook Graph Search may well be the most potent weapon in the average marketer’s arsenal that’s come along in a long time. Unlike traditional search engines, it enables any marketer to make pitches based on deep peer connections. For Pay Per Call and mobile marketers, it might just prove to be a real game changer.
Facebook Graph Search 101
Essentially, Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine that doesn’t just spit out an ordered list of web links. Rather, it uses natural language processing to delve into the connections between Facebook’s theoretical 1 billion users to suss out what’s really meaningful. Basically, it’s Google+ Local on steroids. Using the Open Graph protocol to find meaning in a sea of data, it’s the new geo-targeting for social media. A boon for shoppers, it’s an even better deal for forward-thinking marketers who recognize its true potential.
Using Graph Search In Real Life
Let’s look at Graph Search from the point of view of the consumer to understand its true power. Let’s say you’re looking for a pizza shop liked by your friends from San Francisco located in Boston. Graph Search can tell you which pizza joints are good in Boston based on what your ‘Frisco friends enjoyed in the past. At the moment, this search regimen delivers pretty accurate results, though it’s all based on Likes at this point. Graph Search doesn’t recognize words that are published within status updates yet. However, status updates will be indexed by the end of the year.
Applications to Pay Per Call
The great thing about Pay Per Call is that it’s already tuned to narrowing down the potential consumer pile by default. With Graph Search, you can narrow your focus even further when placing numbers online. Just look through your potential quarries when doing basic market research, then troll through their friends to know who you’re targeting. Once you’ve more positively ID’d your target demo, you can tune your ads to appeal to them. Use Sponsored Stories on Facebook or Twitter’s Direct Messages to go after the right potential consumers.
Best Practices & Optimization
An entirely new genre of SEO known as Graph Search Optimizationhas opened up to marketers since the debut of Graph Search itself. Whatever business they happen to be promoting, marketers should be looking at Facebook Graph Search when tweaking their campaigns. A big part of GSO is media, which leads to Likes. Likes lead to connections over the long haul. Last but not least, those connections lead to calls, as long as your number is front and center once people go searching for a business. Think of Graph Search as a business intelligence tool rather than a catch-all for your promotion problems and use it to put your number where it matters most.
Read More: 3 Skills Every Facebook Advertising Pro Has Mastered
Final Words of Wisdom
As with any new technology, Graph Search presents some unique challenges. Though you may fumble its handling at the outset, you can quickly rise to the top by being one of the first to leverage its awesome possibilities insofar as customer attraction goes. Graph Search could quickly outpace Google’s own AdWords as far as really targeting the right people is concerned. Begin to cope with the new search reality right now and you’re that much further ahead of the game. Pay Per Call plus Graph Search is a win for the right marketers with gumption and initiative.