(MENAFN Press) (EMAILWIRE.COM, January 25, 2013 ) San Francisco, CA --
A new line of advertising dollars could be available for Facebook if it can utilize its new search tool by getting users to notice the service.
Facebook released the new search tool earlier in the week, as the company accounted the Graph Search, as a tool designed to enable users to find information on the Facebook platform.
The tool is not a stand-alone search engine like most popular engines. Instead the Graph Search is focused on gathering data from users' associations on the social network. In other words, the search pools data from friends of the user.
As an example, if one wishes to know about the best hybrid car under 25,000, or where the best bakery in town is, Graph Search, will seek out what social network relations are saying about the potential items.
One of the obvious advantages of the system is that it is better at keeping people on the site for a more sustained period of time. With that in mind, if users do not have to wander off the Facebook site, Facebook simply gets more time with their customers' eyeballs glued to their site. In turn, that means more opportunity for advertising scenarios.
If a user wishes to search for the best restaurant in town, for instance, Facebook can utilize the keywords (whatever they may be) to find the best restaurant within the area, based upon what friends and associates have paid. For gaps in the connectivity of useful information, there can be paid advertising based upon keywords. Companies will likely pay well for that kind of targeted message.
Advertising could benefit from better ad targeting as the natural language search queries will be more detailed, personal and the results will be more accurate," said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "So there will be advertising opportunities on Facebook that were not available previously."
There has been no official word on advertising strategy for Graph Search as of yet.
Hadley Reynolds, who is an analyst for IDC, stated that if Graph Search is a success, it makes sense Facebook would focus on pulling in advertising.
"The search ad business works because advertisers can distinguish what kind of keyword clues indicate that a searcher is in purchase mode, and so strategist to place their messages in the context of the user's search results," Reynolds said. "Facebook has to prove that some of its members will find the discovery search useful and help grow the practice of social discovery search to a scale that justifies incremental advertising investment for brands."
