Three reasons Facebook Graph Search is good for business

Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a plan this week to make all of the Likes, check-ins, and photo tags on Facebook actually mean something with the launch of Graph Search. The service is in early beta, and is not yet widely available, but the concept has some valuable implications for businesses on Facebook.

Here are three ways that small and medium businesses can benefit from Facebook Graph Search:

1. Engagement

Facebook is already the online destination where users spend the most time. One report from May of 2012 suggests that users spend nearly 8 hours per month on average perusing Facebook--more than double the amount of time spent on the next closest rival. Facebook also has nearly a billion registered users, and boasts around 150 million unique visitors per month.

So, what do all of these stats mean to you, and what does it all have to do with Graph Search? First, the data underscores the value of Facebook as a platform for connecting with and engaging customers. It's the place to be online, and the people who use it spend a lot of time there. Graph Search is going to give Facebook users even more reason to stay enmeshed in the social network. Queries that people might normally switch over to Google or Bing for, they'll now conduct from within Facebook in order to get responses that are more relevant to them personally.

2. Research

Facebook already represents a massive global repository of valuable marketing data. Companies have spent the past few years trying to grasp how to leverage Facebook Pages, Likes, and other nuances of the social network in order to connect with customers and gain some tactical advantage over competitors.

Graph Search gives businesses a powerful new tool for mining market research data from Facebook. A search of users who Like the company Facebook Page and live in a given area will be instrumental in allocating resources where they can have the most impact. With a little creativity in the queries, a business can learn all sorts of useful correlations that paint a more complete picture of who their customers are, and what they like.

3. Marketing

Facebook Ads already enable targeting on a fairly granular level based on a wide variety of attributes. You can distribute ads by location, age, gender, interests, and more.

Just as cyber criminals can use the power of Facebook Graph Search to pinpoint potential phishing attack victims with greater precision, legitimate businesses can also target marketing efforts to a more exact audience. Granted, Graph Search has some privacy controls built in, so the results for a business doing market research would be based primarily on information that users have shared with the general public--but many users are unaware of the security controls, are too lazy to use them, or simply don't care, so there's plenty of valuable information to be found there.

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Facebook's $1 message test opens inboxes to strangers

For a small number of Facebook users, a buck is now all it takes to get a message into someone's inbox, even if the recipient isn't a friend.

The experiment seems enabled in part by Facebook's new policies, which remove the capability to block messages from people you aren't friends with. Under this policy, the main Inbox is reserved for messages from friends, or for other messages that Facebook's algorithms deem important. Everything else is routed to an "Other" section.

In the test, users can pay $1 to make sure their messages land in the Inbox, rather than the Other section. Facebook thinks this could be the best way to deliver important messages from non-friends while keeping spam out of the Inbox.

"For example, if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox," Facebook wrote in a press release. "For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them."

Facebook says the test only works between individual users in the U.S., and users will have no more than one message per week routed from their Other folder to the Inbox.

Where's the benefit to Facebook?

The timing of the experiment is certainly odd, given that Facebook is already dealing with blowback from its own privacy policy changes, as well as Instagram's new terms of service (which have now been rescinded in response to user backlash).

While this doesn't sound like it would be a huge revenue source for Facebook, as a way to solve messaging it seems like a kludge. Besides, regular email has worked just fine for the scenarios Facebook describes--no dollar required.

The immediate concern with $1 messages is that it could open the door to spam or other unwanted messages--for instance, harassment from an ex-boyfriend or bullying students--even if that's not Facebook's intent. And now that there's no way to prevent non-friends from sending messages, there's no way for users to opt out of getting paid messages.

The experiment reminds me of Facebook's promoted posts, which let users pay $7 to send their status updates to the top of friends' news feeds. It's a quick-and-dirty solution, rather than one that users will love.

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Facebook launches Poke app, reinventing feature

Facebook has reinvented its Poke feature with a new standalone iOS app that lets you send messages, photos and videos to your friends on the social networking service that disappear within 10 seconds of someone opening them.

While it might have been a while since any of your friends on Facebook have used the feature, now you can check out the app released Friday.

Supposedly coded with help from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Poke joins a handful of other standalone Facebook apps, including Instagram, Messenger and Camera.

Poke is similar to another popular app called Snapchat, which also erases messages once they're viewed and has millions of users who send roughly 50 million messages a day.

Poke lets you send a 120-character note, take a photo and annotate it with doodles or words or make a short video. You can also choose how long recipients can view your message -- 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds.

Apps like Snapchat and Poke certainly have utility for some people, especially considering how much trouble a person can get into if the wrong kind of message surfaces beyond its intended audience.

Consider former CIA Director David Petraeus, who recently resigned because of sexually charged emails discovered by the FBI, or New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who was accused of sending a lewd picturevia Twitter to a college student in Washington state.

While a Poke message recipient can take a screenshot to preserve a particular communication, the app smartly alerts a sender when someone does so as well as gives instructions about what they can do about it.

The app's help center also links to information about what to do if an adult is making a minor uncomfortable as well as guidance regarding nude photo requests.

"If you ever see something you're uncomfortable with, you can click the gear menu and report it," Facebook wrote in a blog post.

Facebook seems to be keen on amping its messaging capabilities and also on Friday announced that it was testing a capability that lets people pay $1 to deliver a note to someone's inbox, even if that person isn't a friend.

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Use Facebook's new Social Jobs app to find work

Looking for a job? Now you can leverage one of the sites that you use the most, Facebook, to help in your hunt.

Facebook on Wednesday rolled out its long-awaited Social Jobs app for U.S. users, which has aggregated more than 1.7 million job listings from job search sites that were already using Facebook to reach recruits, including Jobvite, BranchOut, Work4Labs, and Monster.com.

The social network first announced plans for a jobs app last October as a joint venture with the Labor Department. The two launched the Social Jobs Partnership, a group that includes the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, and the Direct Employers Association.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis in a statement said "the foundation of an industry-supported open-source job-posting schema" is "helping America get back to work."

The national unemployment rate in October dipped below 8 percent for the first time since January 2009.

Facebook says the app is a natural progression in social networking. NACE research indicates that 50 percent of employers already use Facebook to find new hires. Those employers said potential recruits can better use Facebook to find jobs by liking company pages and networking with contacts.

"Facebook is all about connecting people, and we're thrilled to see developers leveraging our platform to connect job seekers and prospective employers," Marne Levine, Facebook's vice president for global public policy, said in a statement. "By allowing job seekers to view and share job openings based on personalized criteria, like location and industry, the Social Jobs Application builds on our broader effort to help people use social media to find jobs in the U.S."

LinkedIn competitor?

It's unclear whether Facebook intends to ramp up competition with professional networking site LinkedIn, which has 175 million users compared to Facebook's 1 billion. LinkedIn offers paid accounts for both job hunters and recruiters. For now, Facebook's jobs app serves as a marketplace of other sites' listings.

LinkedIn recently revamped its user profiles to make the site more visually appealing in an effort to compete with other social networks.

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