Will Social Graph Search on Facebook ever be relevant?

There’s absolutely zero evidence that people are using it, and there is significant evidence that people don’t like or trust Facebook as a brand, so there’s little likelihood people will become as intimate with it as Google.  A good example of this is Facebook’s phone, and “home”, and the horrendous failure that was.  Another note: Facebook throws together Press Conferences to stop people from looking at their decreasing accounts.  They announced the IPO days after it was reported that they lost 6 million people in the US in May of 2011, and then they hastily announced an IPO (more here:  https://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2011/06/14/the-end-of-facebook/ ). Later, it was reported they lost 1.4M users in the US in Dec 2012, and 600K in UK in same month… and the day after those numbers came out, they hastily announced search, which didn’t open to anyone for a year, and even then was about 1% of users (more here: Facebook & Travel – I’m Sorry Facebook, Something Went Wrong).  It’s possible Social Graph was just an idea, and they panicked and launched too early.

That of course doesn’t address social graph search’s lack of functionality, and it’s assumption that users on Facebook a) fill out information accurately and honestly, b) care about having a relationship with a brand, or c) will ever interact with pages enough to make that side of Facebook successful, and d) the network of friends on Facebook will produce any relevant insight between friends in searches.  Just because you know someone doesn’t necessarily mean you will have the same interests, and with confirmation bias and selective perception inside that filter bubble, it’s pretty obvious that you will either get too much info, or none at all.

Right now, interaction levels on pages are abysmal. We don’t have the metrics to differentiate between a “like”, and a “like that has hidden content from their feed”. I talk at length about this here:  Narcissism, Brand Pages, and the Challenge of Facebook., and then an open letter to FB here:  https://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2012/06/07/open-letter-to-facebook-brands-need-to-see-how-many-users-that-like-a-page-have-also-hidden-our-updates/

In this, the entire page structure of facebook is broken, so much so that they have stopped supporting tools like “checkin and location for business” (Again, I go into this in detail here: Facebook & Travel – I’m Sorry Facebook, Something Went Wrong).  Pages are also now completely isolated from other content, a model FB hopes will cause people to advertise within newsfeeds. Their travel vertical is completely ignorant and isolated in a silo so as not to truly interact or help brands interact with Facebook, and therefore businesses are becoming silently skeptical of FB, and moving on to measures that provide demonstrable results, like Google Plus.  Their review component is a disaster, and not one person can even say what they are trying to do (more here: FACEBOOK REVIEW COMPONENT *LIVE*: Too little, too late, or complete & total game changer?).

But the most important part is this: People don’t want an intimate one-to-one conversation with a brand. Maybe a few %, but FB interaction levels are at .0001% of fanbase. .0001 PERCENT (more here:  A person liked your page because they want to wear your hotel brand like a pair of Chanel Glasses or a Louis Vuitton bag…. they want to be seen with it, seen wearing it… “this defines me”.  But they don’t want a conversation with that same brand, and so they like it, hide the feed, and move on.

SO: People don’t trust Facebook, People aren’t going to change their search habits, the FB graph information won’t be nearly as relevant as Google Search with reviews from 1000’s of people across travel websites (versus the opinion of one friend), the page model for Facebook is broken and isolated from user’s feeds, Brands are focusing on more meaningful initiatives, and not one of us has ever heard of anyone using Social Graph Search in any meaningful way for any meaningful purpose.

So, no. Never. Google is a consumer site. Amazon is a consumer site. Tripadvisor and OTA’s are a consumer site.  Pinterest? People planning travel. Sure. Twitter? Yup. People asking brands questions. But the idea that marketers are brainwashing our industry into thinking Facebook is the #1 place to interact with your branded followers is absurd. I am getting tired of looking like an insane person on a soapbox, but Google and Google Plus are all that matters for search. That’s it. (More here: Facebook is not alive and well for hoteliers, and fluff articles like this are damaging to our industry)

FACEBOOK WILL NEVER, EVER BE A SITE WHERE USERS HAVE A CONSUMER MINDSET. They’re there to waste 2 minutes looking at friend’s baby or photos of food or the latest viral video.  Facebook is irrelevent to us, and will stay that way until it becomes a content distribution engine, more like a cable channel, making their money off us accessing apps and media.  Or they just cave like a black hole. Whatever.