When creating a Facebook presence it’s important to understand how people are going to find you. My assumption is that a majority of fan growth occurs from seeing other users that are fans of specific brands. However, some consumers are still searching for corporate fan pages to join in an effort to show off their favorite brands. Understanding how Facebook internal search works can help you name your page and create a strategy to place yourself in front of the right people.
From what I’ve noticed Facebook places importance on a number of elements when searching. The first is the name of the profile with mutual friends, page, group, or profile without mutual friends; in that order. For example, if I were to search the term “apple”, Facebook will return all profile pages with a mutual friend who contain the word “apple” in their name. Once all those profile pages are returned, it will finally return pages and applications.
When I search for a specific term that isn’t found in a profile pages’ name, Facebook returns any groups by that name and then profiles with mutual friends that contain the search term in the profile information. An example of this is the search term “dunkin donuts”.
Finally, if you search for a term and only search for pages, Facebook ranks pages out by number of fans.
Speculating
So with what we’ve seen from Facebook search what else could there be? What else could they add?
When I first started writing this post, I thought that Facebook might rank groups and pages based on how many mutual friends are fans. This might make sense considering the idea that if my friends like it, there’s a good chance I might as well.
Secondly, I also thought that fan pages and groups might be assigned a geographic location based on the location of a majority of its fans. This would mean that a page with a large number of California fans would rank higher to a California searcher than a page with a large number of New York fans.
What do you think? Have you seen anything interesting while doing Facebook searches? How can Facebook make its search feature better?
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