Facebook Makes A Move Towards Local – How Does This Impact Domain Investors?

Today Facebook made a big deal about a huge exciting announcement. I got excited, like so many other people, it was going to be something cool, new, different, lots of buzz and sizzle…oh no wait it’s Graph Search. News reporters scratched their heads as they tried to explain the hottest story of the day, which was a little confusing for some of them.

No it wasn’t a slick new tablet or a new model for mobile advertising, it’s Graph Search. So what is Graph Search and why all the excitement?

First things first, Graph Search is not the same as Web Searching so for anyone that thought Google was making a move to replace Google, they’re not, at least not yet. Instead Graph Search is a search of Facebook’s slice of the Internet, which happens to be a pretty active slice.

Think of this as a better way to search and organize information on Facebook, and sadly, a way for creepy stalkers to get, well, even creepier. Mark is really excited about it too saying in the press conference today:

“This is some really neat stuff,” says Zuckerberg. “This is the coolest thing we’ve done in a while.”

Yelp’s stock took a dive as there is a lot of initial speculation on the impact this will have on local search and reviews. Many people would rather hear what their friends think about a new restaurant then a bunch of strangers on Yelp, right?

There was also talk of the impact this will have on Google Local as people may begin using Facebook for some of their local searches. Mark put together this short video introducing the new addition:

As always I have my Domainer hat on when I hear these stories and so immediately I think of GeoDomains. For those who think GeoDomaining is dead, think again, there are plenty of people kicking butt with GeoDomains and I don’t think this will have much of an impact.

It’s easy to take news like this and assume the worst but in reality change takes a long time, and, many of the GeoDomainers I know are some of the smartest people on the planet so are probably already thinking about how to leverage this new addition. I think GeoDomainers that use Facebook Pages to promote their sites will probably see a nice lift and even the potential to get a lot more traffic than ever before if they perform well in Facebook’s search.

This of course leads to the topic of Facebook graph optimization, which like SEO could be a new trend we see in 2013. Optimizing for a search engine is one thing, optimizing for the Facebook graph, well that’s a whole new world.

That’s my two cents, now it’s your turn, what do you think about Facebook’s big announcement today and how do you think it will impact the Domaining world?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton