Kamis, 12 November 2009

The Inside Story: Facebook Marketing Strategies

SEOmoz Blog On August 26th, 2008 Facebook, Inc. reached the milestone of 100,000,000 active users. Since then, its growth has continued to grow exponentially into emerging markets and additional countries. At the same time, the company has remained a relatively untapped oasis for internet marketers.

I recently had the chance to meet Facebook engineers Andew “Boz” Bosworth, creator of the much talked about News Feed, and David Fetterman, lead engineer for the Facebook Development Platform, and took to the opportunity to find out exactly how the website could best be used by internet marketers and SEOs. The features we talked about are below.


Facebook Search

According to Bosworth, Facebook operates the largest people search engine on the internet. It is run by ten engineers (two of whom work solely on people search) and directs traffic for millions of people a day.

People Search’s secret sauce is its ability to employ the searcher’s social graph to find the most relevant Pages (business profiles) and people to a given user. Once the people search engine narrows down the users list of Facebook friends and Pages, it returns five related results in an alphabetically ordered drop down menu. This built in search engine is heavily used and currently underutilized by SEOs.

Facebook Search
Facebook Search
TIP: Note the opportunity to take advantage of the inherent flaws of returning results in alphabetical order. It is not a coincidence that so many companies named themselves with alphabetical order in mind in the days when yellow pages were popular. (Ex. AAA Plumbing) The same tactic can be used to drive users to a given Facebook Page.
The search function also has a lesser known feature that has the ability to drive traffic outside of the site. When a user types in a query that doesn’t match anything in their social graph, the search bar provides the ability to search Microsoft’s Live search index.

Facebook Search The Web
Facebook's Search the Web uses Microsoft's Live Index

Performing a search of the web through Facebook returns search results and ads that are exactly the same as those returned by Microsoft’s Live.

Facebook Search
Facebook Search Engine Result Page (SERP)

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