Facebook also big on search

It turns out that Facebook is one of the largest search engines online. The social network claims to process over 500 million searches per month, effectively making it a top 20 search engine in the world in terms of numbers of search. In the view of 77 all the more reason to look into this site as a marketing opportunity.

Facebook now has plans, according to Aditya Agarwal, a Facebook Tech Lead, to venture into personalized people search. This would mean a person is easier to find if he is closerby to you within your social network – that is, you know this person in fewer ‘steps’.

Combined with representing a brand by a character on a social site, this could be a powerful tool. It’s not had to imagine how fast a campaign can explode on a social network if it keeps becoming easier to find this character (because more of your friends will have her as a ‘friend’).

Also, this will help the selection of opinion leaders. The ones with many friends on social networks are often relatively better to have as prophets for your brand than the ones with very few friends. On that note, personalized search might speed up the process of selecting opinion leaders in a group of people, which migh makeit easier for marketers to select their targets.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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