Facebook Adds Post Search Functionality

Every business owner and marketer in the world knows that online reputation and customer experience are extremely important aspects of their success. Now, almost two years after Facebook initially promised to add increased search functionality to its network, the company is rolling out an expansion of its search box to allow free-form searches of anything posted on the service.

The enhanced search functionality will be rolled out to English-language Facebook users in the United States this week on both desktop and iPhone versions, with Android to follow. This is big news for marketers in their continued analysis to better understand the intricacies of customer experiences and to use that information to improve advertising and services and to increase revenue. Many people will openly share opinions about many businesses on Facebook that they wouldn’t post on review sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, or others. Now, with the inclusion of advanced search capabilities on Facebook, marketers will have access to a plethora of customer experience information that wasn’t previously available.

Early reports by users indicate the new Facebook Search works very well for finding recommendations, whether those are for car dealerships, restaurants, apps, movies, dry cleaners, or many other business types. It’s certainly possible Facebook will experience great success and user adoption in this regard, potentially reducing the share of this market that is currently controlled by Yelp and other popular review sites. Regardless, there’s no question marketers will be digging deeply into this new wealth of customer experience information to learn as much as possible about the reputation of their businesses.

Some industry insiders are skeptical about the success of Facebook Search, claiming that the company has often overpromised on search capabilities in the past. However, whether or not the functionality works well and becomes popular should become clear quite quickly. If it works, it could unlock a massive amount of information.

“We have indexed all the content on Facebook,” explained Rousseau Kazi, a product manager at Facebook who works on the search team. Assuming this statement is accurate, that’s a massive amount of indexing. In January, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that users had posted more than one trillion pieces of content that need to be analyzed for post search to work.

Up until now, search on Facebook has been extremely limited, allowing users to search only for specific categories of information such as city of residence or pages your friends have liked. Additionally, even this simplistic search worked only on the desktop version of Facebook and not on mobile. Considering the sophistication of search offered by Google and others, it became clear that Facebook needed to offer significantly more advanced search capabilities on its network.

Mr. Kazi explained Facebook tested the new version of search for approximately nine months before choosing to roll it out widely. “We keep the content really high on this,” said Kazi.

Will Facebook utilize post search for targeted advertising purposes? Not at this point, however, the New York Times reported Facebook has tested contextual ads that can be run against keywords in posts. Facebook may work with marketers in the future to show targeted ads based on post keywords, which would open up a new world of advertising possibilities on the social network.