Search: Google vs. Facebook

7/09/2009 by Jack Burnett

At TwinEngines we create websites and focus on the web presence of small and mid-market companies.  For a website, it is important to start with the business goals and objectives, address design, information architecture and usability.  It is also very important to have fresh, relavent and unique content on each web page, organized for the search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo; but mostly Google.

Today, the web is dominated by Google, with its algorithms that parse through websites to build a map of the online world.  When you have a serach engine optimization program and your website is listed on top at Google for a keyword phrase, chances are your website receives a lot of traffic.

Then there is your company Facebook site targeted for the social media marketplace.  A place where you can have conversations with customers and potential customers, vendors, and even competitors. Facebook is attempting a more personalized Web, where you turn to your network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family for information. 

Facebook treats all of its data as proprietary so if you want to find something in Facebook, you have to be logged into Facebook.  A Google search will not retrieve any of the Facebook infomation, except the most basic data made public by users.  When it comes to search, Facebook is like Las Vegas, what happens in Facebook, stays in Facebook.

Facebook doesn't offer the rich search functionality found at Google and the other search engines.  But that will change soon when Facebook launches Facebook Search, allowing users to search other users' feeds.  The idea being, you want to know what your friends, colleagues, peers and family think of a company, product or service more than some anonymous person Google found based on a mathematical calculation.

TwinEngines partners with independent graphics designers and design agencies in Atlanta, GA.  One recently asked permission to place photos of her web design compositions on Facebook - designs of websites where TwinEngines created the strategy, the creative design plan and then took her design composition to produce the html integrating page templates to the content management system.

We considered the implications of allowing her to promote designs for our customers' websites.  One day soon people will be able to search on converstaions about those photos and the questions became "should the name 'TwinEngines' be associated with the photos - does TwinEngines lose out in search for the company websites in any way?"

While Facebook hasn't yet figured out how to make money, it is starting to become a second Internet, and companies need to consider that there are over 200 million Facebook users today. Companies need to consider the implications when Facebook Search allows these 200 million users to search for your company, your product or service.

What are your plans for your company Facebook site and how do you monitor the converstations about your company, your products and your services?  Are you ready to jump into those conversations to respond to challenges, to talk with customers and to promote and protect your brand?  Are you ready for both Google search and Facebook search when it comes to search engine optimization? 

By the way, we gave the OK for the design photos on Facebook with caveats on the text descriptions of the photos.  We think it is a win-win situation - perfect for our partnership.

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