The Facebook newsroom announced today that users can now utilize graph search to search Facebook posts and status updates by their friends as well as public post. It’s also possible to search for posts with certain keywords such as city names or time periods. You can also search posts by location, for example: “Posts written at Disneyland” to generate a list of public results from your friends and other users.
via Facebook Newsroom
However, unlike the examples Facebook shows in their announcement posts, this feature is slowly being rolled out to all users and is not available to everyone at this time. Most users will see the following result when they try to search posts in status update concerning specific keywords, topics, or locations:
Additionally, even though the ability to search all your Facebook posts from the last year (or even more complicated connected posts like “Posts about the NBA that I commented on” will be available soon, all I’m getting is:
Even though post and status update search isn’t supported for all users yet, when it does finally roll out to everyone, marketers and companies can use graph search in a variety of ways, including:
- Searching for mentions of brand name
- Searching for current event topics to tie into existing marketing campaigns
- Competitor research
- Current and potential employee research
- Blog post ideas: What questions are people asking?
The graph search will most likely be controversial due to privacy concerns (which Facebook addresses here), however, it has benefits for both users and marketers alike: everyone wants to be able to stay in touch with people they know (or want to know) online.
Does Post and Status Update Search work for you? Let us know in the comments.
