I know it seems like we’re always saying there’s something new that you can’t afford to ignore, and well, we’re about to do it again. That’s how fast things change these days. It’s why you can’t rest on your laurels when marketing your business in 2013. The playing field changes constantly, and you need to know which changes matter and which don’t.

This we can promise you: Facebook Graph Search absolutely matters. It’s a very big deal.

This innovation was only released earlier this month, and it’s proving to be worth the huge buzz. The important question, of course: What is it?

It’s basically a new search engine that works inside Facebook. It’s currently in its beta stage, so Facebook users can join in after getting on a wait list.

You’re likely familiar with the very basic Facebook search we’ve come to know and… not so much love. There’s not much to it. To find a friend or business, you punch in a name. However, you invariably get a lot of hits that are not the person or place you’re looking for. So you scroll through them and hopefully, eventually, find what you’re looking for.

That’s why Facebook launched Graph Search: to make the Facebook search experience much easier and more efficient. It’s actually powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which — while not as popular as Google Search — works well and has many advantages of its own.

In a nutshell, the search function pulls up much more relevant information that’s based on you — your interests, your pastimes, what you care about.

By doing this, you receive results that are far more likely to align with what (and whom) you’re looking for. There are similarities between this and Google+, but Facebook remains far more popular for social interaction than Plus does.

Facebook is hoping that instead of simply using Google Search to find businesses and people of interest to you, you’ll use its Graph Search function, which it believes will get you what you’re looking for faster and much more efficiently.

While how this will all shake out has yet to be seen (as the function moves out of beta and becomes widely adopted), there’s no question that having powerful interests such as Facebook and Microsoft behind it means that Graph Search will become a big player in online search.

For now, what it means to local businesses is that they should ensure they’re active and well represented on Facebook, both on their own pages and in interacting with users. That will increase the likelihood that people using Graph Search will find your business.

Not only that, but you’ll be prequalified by “Likes” from those users’ friends and people within their fields of interest. Ring Ring Marketing is happy to help explain how to be prepared for how Graph Search is going to affect online search and business marketing efforts going forward.