When is a social network not a social network? When it's a search engine, of course.
The search panel at the top of every Facebook page was introduced to enable users to search for other people on the social networking site. In its early days, a number of commentators fretted that this was the end of privacy on the site (boy, did they underestimate that one); now, the box is used for finding companies, too.
If you've spent good money creating a Facebook profile for your brand, keeping it up to date and managing the community that's gathered around it, you'll want to be found. You'll want consumers who are interested to be able to type the brand in and have it appear at the top of the results.
This is worth having, because if you're not in the first eight results, users will have to click on the 'see more results' link at the bottom. Not only is this link hard to find, the behaviour of Google users tells us people rarely bother to go beyond the first page.
So do you make the cut?
Most brands and agencies haven't given it a second thought yet. Ranking well in Facebook's search, though, is an increasingly important base to cover. In March this year, searches within the site took almost 3% of total search volume in the US. Not a big share, but impor-tant if, like many brands, you're printing the words 'find us on Facebook' on your ads.
So how does Facebook search work, and can you get to the top?
Graham Everitt, a search consultant at search specialist Reform Digital, puts it this way: 'With Facebook, it's always friends first.'
He points to the seven key position drivers in the Facebook algorithm; friends with the keyword that users are searching on in their name, places users have visited (apps, groups and so on), places users or their friends have been invited to, friends' and users' likes, total likes/fans, mentions of the keyword in wall posts, and number of active users.
With Google, a ranking is influenced by PageRank; factors such as the number of links to a page, relevance of content on the page to the query, page titles, URL structure - these make up the principal ingredients for success.
So because Facebook's approach is radically different, being mostly driven by the actions of you and your friends, 'normal' search engine optimisation approaches won't work.
The good news is that, despite this, the social network's algorithm is just as gameable. The bad news is that the algorithm is susceptible to power law influences that could result in it being very difficult to work your way back from a weak position.
Most of us are familiar with the 80/20 or Pareto rule, which says that 20% of a population will hold 80% of the wealth. It's an example of power law, where the frequency of an event varies as a power of an attribute of that event. Observed commonly in nature, its effect here is that popular Facebook pages ('liked' by many) will, in turn, become more popular (because they're more visible to users).
A few pages will come to dominate search results rapidly, and as others are pushed down the rankings, their ability to be liked, friended or visited by Facebook users recedes, further depressing their position.
Clay Shirky wrote on his blog in 2003 (bit.ly/a138AA) that this was an innate feature of social networks, making them unreliable search engines. His piece was aimed at blogs, but its effect is magnified with Facebook search.
So while it's still far from a big or perfect search engine, if you've invested in a presence on Facebook, a thought to optimising for search might be a wise investment; it could be a long haul back if you lose visibility.
Andrew Walmsley is a digital pluralist
30 SECONDS ON ... THE PARETO PRINCIPLE
- It was the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto's observation that 80% of the peas in his garden were produced by 20% of the peapods that led to the conception of this fundamental business principle.
- Put simply, the Pareto principle, also referred to as the 80/20 rule, is that, on average, 80% of your outcomes will come from 20% of your efforts.
- The exact figures of 80% and 20% are not important. What is important is an understanding of the imbalance.
- The principle holds true, regardless of the business's nature. Take Microsoft, which realised that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, it could stop 80% of the errors and crashes on its software.
- Brands can apply the principle in many ways. For example, for a big brand, it's likely that about 80% of profits come from about 20% of products or services. This makes it worthwhile trying to closely identify what the 80% of the most profitable lines are.
- Beware of how to use the rule, though. Simply cutting the weakest 20% of a brand portfolio would leave a company vulnerable to its popular products falling out of vogue and having nothing to fall back on.
- In a similar vein, a weak-looking 20% of a brand's market may be where its long-term growth prospects lie.
- Remember not to look for an exact 80/20 ratio using this theory. The Pareto principle is essentially the law of the vital few versus the trivial many.