How to Use Facebook’s Graph Search to Supercharge Your Professional Network

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Graph Search is a way to explore Facebook’s wide array of information about people. The feature has slowly rolled out over the past few months and Facebook expects to extend this feature to everyone by the end of 2013.

Considering the huge amount of information Facebook has about people, like what they’re interested in, books they read, restaurants they like and more, it’s surprising the company has taken this long to create a social graph enabled search engine. As someone serious about your career, imagine all the possibilities for networking this feature opens up — like finding out where friends of friends work, or finding other ukulele enthusiasts in your network.

Recruiters are already taking advantage of Graph Search. For example, the California-based social recruiting software company Work4 will be offering recruiters a candidate searching solution that leverages Facebook’s one billion users to fill jobs. For example, recruiters can search for “people who worked as Software Engineers in San Francisco, California this year” in order to fill a local engineering role.

Here are a few ways you can use this feature to supercharge your professional networking efforts.

Use Graph Search to Expand Your First Degree Network

Once Graph Search is enabled, it can be found at the very top of your Facebook Profile. By using search phrases, instead of keywords, you can discover all sorts of people in and outside of your current network.

Previously, it was very difficult to know what companies were represented in your network and extended (friends of friends) network. Now you can see what companies you have connections to, locations you might have acquaintances in and even brands your network prefers. For example, as evidenced by the screenshot below, I can use Graph Search to find employees of Charlie Sheen who live in Rhode Island.

 

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So if you are targeting a company to work for and want to know if people in your network (friends or friends of friends) work there, you can. And with Facebook’s pay-to-message feature, you can pay to have your message delivered to their inbox.

Try some of these graph search ideas to advance your own job search networking:

  • people who work at (company) who live in (location)
  • people who work at (company) who went to (school)
  • friends of my friends who work at (company)
  • companies my friends like who live in (location)

It Doesn’t Have to Be Job Search Either, Try Ukuleles

Anything that Facebook records is fair game, including schools people went to and books people read, to find commonalities.

When I traveled to Nashville for a speech for Belmont University, I used Graph Search to see what restaurants my friends liked in the area by searching “restaurants in Nashville my friends like.”

Source: http://mashable.com/2013/09/14/facebook-graph-search-jobs/