Mediaboss Marketing

Over the past year, Facebook has crushed the organic reach of the posts published by many Pages. Its harder than ever to get exposure in the News Feed without paying for it. Still, Facebook has launched new features, including tools specifically for Pages, which do create some potential for new opportunities.

We wanted to get some thoughts on some of these from a true Facebook marketing expert, so we reached out to Mari Smith, author of of The New Relationship Marketing and coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day.

Facebook has made some big improvements to its search experience, adding keyword-based search to bring up post results, among other things. You can now find who has said what about any given topic. Are there opportunities for businesses here?

The ability to search for posts seems to be rather buggy and needs much improvement, Smith tells WebProNews. So far, despite a myriad of search tests myself, Im not finding it terribly useful. Over time, however, as refinements are made, businesses will be able to surface any post created by users on their personal profile, shared with public. Ideally, well also be able to surface posts made by Pages, too.

Asked if she sees Facebooks search feature becoming more of a go-to destination for users in light of its improvements, Smith says, Not yet. Facebooks search has a long way to go. It will be interesting to see just how widely users have taken to the new tabbed design of the search results page. Its not that obvious, at first. And, its not even that obvious how to search and surface items such as friends photos, places, events, etc. My guess is most users simply use the search bar for looking up other users profiles. Facebook would do well to provide further education/tutorials on how to optimize search.

We also spoke with Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin about Facebook search recently. He doesnt see Facebook search becoming very significant anytime soon either in terms of being a place where users regularly go to look for information.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked a bit about search during the companys earnings call last week.

So, our view on this is that there is a lot of unique content that people have shared in Facebook, a lot of personal content, recommendations from friends that you can get that you just wouldnt be able to get through a traditional web search service or other app, he said. And were on this multiyear voyage to basically index all the content and make it available to people and rank it well. We started off by launching graph search which I think included more than a trillion different connections in the first system.

And the second round of the search progress that we just started rolling out at the end of last year was post search, which now has indexed more than I think a trillion posts, which I mean the sizes of these corpuses are bigger than anything in a traditional web search corpus that you would find, he added. So its an interesting and fun challenge to make this work. Were seeing that people immediately understand how they can use this and find content that theyve seen in News Feed before or that theyve posted with just a few keywords.

In terms of what types of content might work best for Pages when it comes to visibility in Facebook search, Smith tells us, Visual wins the game for organic, paid and search results whether images or video. Our brains process images, especially containing real people, much faster than words. Plus, our attention spans have reduced, so the quicker businesses can communicate their message in a visual manner, the better. Videos under 60 seconds are ideal, with a blend of informative and entertaining, if possible. Notice when we do a search on Google, the row of YouTube video thumbnails always stands out!

Originally posted here:
Facebook Marketing Expert Mari Smith On Utilizing The Social Networks New Features