How Facebook’s new feature could help generate leads

The social media giant's new tool lets users to search keywords in their news feeds, potentially making generating leads much easier for real estate professionals.

On Monday, Facebook launched keyword search, which allows users to search their new feeds for specific posts their friends have made. By making friends’ posts searchable, the social media has potentially made generating leads much easier for real estate professionals.
 
The new feature will help people get more use out of the increasingly overcrowded news feed and could make Facebook more useful. But, it’s nowhere near a replacement for Google for general web searches.
 
However, queries for “mortgage” or “renovation loan” could surface recommendations from friends that compete with Google results, or surface a feed of recent mentions or news articles by friends, similar to Twitter.
 
Facebook has already made it easy to search for a person, business or interest page on Facebook, but the new functionality allows users to search for keywords in statuses. Now, mortgage professionals can search their friends’ posts to see who is in the market for real estate.
 
The tool could also help business pages. Users who like a page can now more easily find past posts published by that page.
 
The search results will be listed based on a variety of factors such as time of post, "engagement" (how many other people interacted with them) and the closeness of the person to you (posts from friends will be ranked higher than posts from friends of friends).
 
Previously, Facebook’s Graph Search let members look for people, places, interests and photos that had been shared on the social network.