If you didn’t already know, I love Facebook. It is my platform of choice, it is what people at work ask me for advice on and it is what I spend most of my time on the web doing.
It is becoming increasingly hard for me to prove the value of Facebook to my company, because the Insights page provided on Facebook fan pages is terrible. From the insights page all you can see is the demographic breakdown of your fans and the total number of “interactions.” An interaction is counted when someone comments or “likes” your Facebook page. But that isn’t good enough for me! I want to know what people are saying about our products OFF of our fan pages. I want Facebook search!
Much like Twitter search, I want Facebook to allow me to search through Facebook status updates by keyword. I know that the point of Facebook is that you can have a much more private profile than on sites like Twitter. But honestly, I don’t even really care who specifically posted the status update, I just want to know what people are saying. According to Facebook, more than 30 million users update their status at least once a day. There would be a huge benefit to marketers and brands if they could see and respond to what people are saying on Facebook.
Facebook, why won’t you let me search?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Facebook really fell off in search quality a few years ago with the implementation of ‘new’ Facebook. For example, I used to be able to search my friends by anything in their profile. Most commonly, I would use this to determine if any of my friends had recently gotten engaged. Now I can’t figure this out without checking each account individually…. well, I guess I could write a script……
Hey Stephen,
I agree that it is now very difficult to search through your friends, which is interesting because Facebook is trying to become a leader in real-time search (http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-facebook-search/).
I guess they still have a few things to figure out over there!
Thanks for your comment,
Blake
I am too lazy for fb search!