You thought Facebook was cool? Wait until you see this.
Last March, Facebook released their Open Graph project. For those of you who don't follow Facebook developer things, you probably just noticed the world domination by that little Thumbs Up button on every site ever developed. But now the promise of that little Like Button is becoming available.
A Little History Lesson - the Open Graph
Open Graph is the name for Facebook's search hierarchy. It is a different mentality than Google's entirely. Google says, tell me about your page through content and meta and I will see how many people think you are relevant by putting links on their site and then balance the value of your content and deliver results.
What Facebook is saying is that "Hey Google, you stink. 3 of the first 10 results weren't relevant or current or even worthwhile reading. They just gamed your silly little system." Open Graph says, "tell me about your page, who wrote it, when it was written and I will tell you who likes it. And if enough people like it, I will show it." So in short Open Graph is Facebook's future in the search world and trying to rival Google. Sure people have tried (i.e. Bing and Yahoo) but they were playing on Google's turf. Facebook is trying to play on their own turf. Think of it as Spring Pro Football.
Liked Pages vs. Graphed Pages
You have a like button on your page and that is great and does have value, BUT are you wired into the graph? In order to do so, you need special OG:Meta tags that tell Facebook more about the page. Without the OG Meta, you are just likable but not so much graphable. It is the graph that holds the promise.
Enough of the build up - Give me the Wow
The promise with Open Graph was that you would be able to market to those people who liked certain pages and topics. So a user goes to a listing you had in May and likes the listing. In June you have a similar listing so you can go to those Likers of the first page and send them an update to their News Feed (read facebook wall) and show them your new listing. It is a way to capture marketing contact information and then use it again.
Well this concept was one that was touted, but really wasn't accessible easily until about a week ago when Facebook released documentation on how to go about doing this.
So, if you had properly set up those pages for the Open Graph and you are the notated administrator facebook account for that page, you can go to the page, click Admin page and send an update to your Facebook followers from that specific page.
I know it sounds pretty technical, but just wait a few weeks while those aggressive developers come up with an app to do that for you and you will really start to see the power of Facebook.
Comments(5)