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

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.

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.

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)
  
  

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."

Graph Search isn’t perfect. For example, I don’t Like every restaurant I actually like; and I don’t like every restaurant I Like. And I’m sure it won’t be long before some businesses try to game the system by getting artificial Likes, thus skewing your search results.

Also, not everyone does a very good job filling out their About Me sections with complete work and education histories. Still, I think you’ll be surprised at the kinds of information you can gather from this tool.

People say Facebook isn’t for professional networking. However, since when in human history did people not rely on their friends and family for career opportunities?

What do you think? Will you consider using Facebook for your career advancement? Let us know in the comments.

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• Senior Software Engineer - Messaging at Twilio Inc. in San Francisco, Calif.
  
  
• Director / VP of Marketing at Collective in New York, N.Y.
  
  
• Social Media/Digital Coordinator at The Latin Recording Academy in Miami, Fla.