Yesterday Facebook announced it was going to open up the search function within the site. What this means is that now you can search for any word or phrase you want within Facebook whereas before you could only search for groups, locations, or individuals. This may not seem like a big deal, but from a business perspective it's huge. The walled garden isn't closed anymore.
The world of social media monitoring has been growing steadily for the last year or so, and I think this new development from Facebook is going to blow it wide open. Until now, there were a handful of ways businesses could really know what public sentiment was about their business, brands, products, services etc. They could search blogs, Twitter, discussion boards, and even online video, but Facebook was always the big unknown yet it was the premiere social network with the biggest numbers of people to listen to. Now that it's open, I think it's going to become the first place for businesses to look for consumer sentiment instead of Twitter.
A few weeks ago I talked about measuring social media success using the LACE (leads, awareness, customer service, engagement) method. With the new Facebook search available, smart organizations will be able to do this even better than before.