For most marketing search engine marketing is a common marketing technique and entire business united have been established to focus on search. The most popular tool being Google and in a distant second the Microsoft Bing/live tools. Facebook search on the other hand is a much different beast and much more difficult to market against. In order to optimize we need to understand the Facebook Search function.
The key component to understand with Facebook search is the interaction relationship. This means that content that the user has interacted with in the past will appear first and may appear in the auto-complete if they have Fan, Joined or Bookmarked the content.
Facebook search then will display search results based on your friends involvement with content. This means that individuals, groups, pages, or applications which your friends have interacted with appear at the top. The next considertation is your network(s) and content types with more people from your network will be assigned priority. Facebook has indicated they will removing networks but this logic is likely to be replace with geographic filters.
The next concept to understand is that Facebook assigns a priorty to different content types, assuming you have equal friend interactions or no friend interactions. The priority is generally:
- Individual user profiles
- Facebook Pages
- Facebook Groups
- Facebook Applications
- Facebook Events
- Friend Facebook Posts
- Everyone’s Facebook Posts
After these internal Facebook content types Web Search results will be presented from the Microsoft Bing search results.
The other major different between Facebook and other search tools is the keyword matching. The matching seems to be much more strict that other tools and partial keyword matching is very poor.
Across all content types the depth of search seems to limited to the content title. This is probably the most important tool for Facebook search marketing. Creating an effective title can increase your placement in search. Without partial keyword matching a long title will be difficult to match with user keyword and keyword stuff has limited impact because the title on most content sources is limited.
The other important consideration, especially when combined with paid advertising is to get maximum coverage across networks ( geographic, schools and employers ) and across as many friend clusters as possible. Facebook allows for a number of geographic targeting options and good distribution here can help with Facebook search results.