New White Paper: The Impact of Facebook Graph Search on Multi-Location Businesses

The Where 2 Get It team recently published a new White Paper (available for FREE download through our Facebook Page) discussing the impact of Facebook’s Graph Search on multi-location businesses.

If 2012 was the year that Facebook made significant strides in the mobile sphere, 2013 may be shaping up to be the beginning of the social network’s deep push into local. While it’s mobile monthly active users (mobile MAUs) has grown at an almost exponential pace from mid 2011 to present, the question still remains: Can Facebook effectively bridge the gap between its giant store of social and mobile data online and the inherently local nature of real life consumer foot traffic offline.

The White Paper calls the January 2013 release of Graph Search “an inflection point in the world of search and search marketing” and credits the intersection of the three following features for making Graph Search a unique breed of search:

• It uses natural language sentences like “my friends who like sushi” or “movies my friends like” to power its queries.
• It leverages a user’s social graph, his/her behavior within that social graph as well as the behavior of that user’s social connections to provide highly personalized and extremely relevant results.
• It has the ability to make location a limiting factor within the broader collection of a user’s social data.

Following a brief history and detailed description of Graph Search, the report discusses several ways in which national brands can effectively optimize their Facebook marketing strategies to reach their audiences on a localized level. Topics discussed include: Facebook’s Parent-Child claiming mechanism and it’s effect on reach and the importance of data accuracy for local discovery and visibility.

Recent statistics reported by Facebook during their quarterly earnings releases support this theory that, if optimized correctly, Graph Search represents an opportunity for multi-location businesses to be discovered more easily allowing them to compete on a more localized level.

In the 4th quarter of 2012, mobile daily active users (DAUs) exceeded those on the web for the first time in Facebook’s history. Facebook’s mobile monthly active users has almost tripled since 2011 topping 800 million by Q2 of 2013. In addition, Facebook recently reported that nearly 18 million local businesses now have a Facebook Business Page.

Download the full White Paper through our Facebook Page for FREE to read more!

Do you own or operate a multi-location business? Tell us in the comments: We’d love to know how you are currently using or plan to use Facebook Graph Search to complement your digital marketing strategy.