Emmott On Technology: What Facebook’s Graph Search Means for Dentists

Emmott On Technology: What Facebook’s Graph Search Means for Dentists
Thursday, February 14, 2013

“Graph Search “

If you have not heard that term before; pay attention it will soon have a huge impact on your dental practice.

With over one billion users, Facebook has been an amazing phenomenon that dentists could not ignore, yet there has been little evidence that having a dental office Facebook page has any direct benefit. However, the new Graph Search feature changes everything.

Graph Search was introduced by Facebook January 15, and currently is available in beta to selected users. What Graph Search allows you to do is search your social graph to find photos, videos, friends, and most significantly, likes.

Social graph or a sociogram is a way of describing the connections of individuals. You can think of it as a real life online version of the Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation game. Mary is friends with Susan who is friends with Robert who likes Chevy trucks and Dr. Phillip’s dental office. The relationship of friends and likes is your social graph. A Social Graph is the primary product that Facebook creates.

Facebook has a webpage here: www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch that explains the basic idea behind Graph Search and how it works. There are two short videos worth watching that explain the idea. The second video opens with Mark Zuckerberg explaining Graph Search, then a number of Facebook people add to that including an engineer Lars Rasmussen who actually uses the example of finding a dentist.

“I am relatively new to the area and didn’t have a dentist” he says, “Looking up dentists my friends liked was awesome…”

There it is, “dentists my friends liked.” With Graph Search a patient “like” becomes far more valuable than it was before.

In the past having a practice Facebook page was nice and getting patient likes allowed you to connect with them on a regular basis. This could generate goodwill and might possibly lead to referrals or better retention, but there was no way to actively promote this and actually measure results. Hopefully if a person asked their Facebook friends for a dental referral your patient might refer to you. In that way Facebook has become the digital equivalent of the office water cooler or the backyard fence.

With Graph Search the person looking for a dentist does not have to ask and hope for a response he or she can search their social graph to see which dentists their friends like.

Compare this with a typical Google search. If you type in the word dentist into Google you will get a list of dental referral sites as well as some dentists in your area. Which dentists show up? Those who are Internet savvy have paid a web designer for good SEO and or paid Google to show up on a PPC ad. Are those dentists any good? Will you like them?

With a social Graph Search you are finding dentists your friends use and like. It is much more like an actual personal referral than a random Google search.

The techno press if full of stories about Graph Search asking questions. Will it work? Will it be a Google killer? What about privacy? Will it result in users sharing more or less? All good questions. However, my initial take is that it will work; people will love it because it provides a service they want.

For dentists it means your Facebook page is suddenly more important and should demand a bit more of your time and attention. Getting page likes is much more important. You can do this yourself or work with a company such as Sesame Communications that will help you set up your page and generate patient likes.

The future is coming and it will be amazing!

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