“Social search is a means of uncovering information, to fill a knowledge gap taking into account crowd sourced information from your network, which contains information from a reputable source within your network, giving more of a credible touch to the content.”

--------- Mark Zuckerberg

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wonder who has gone bungee jumping, lived in New York, and eats Japanese food? ” A new feature “Graph Search” announced by Facebook on January 15 enables users to discover new connections by searching the interests, location, and preferences of their friends.

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Graph Search could be a new social element to arts marketing. Imagine, arts managers can easily understand the audience’s preferences of artworks by searching terms like “What exhibitions did the page fans go to in 2012?” “Which artists do my page fans like? ” Preference information helps arts managers figure out the potential audience for a new show, an effective marketing plan to attract the target audience, and an appropriate objective of an arts event. More importantly, the Graph Search allows arts marketers to identify the characteristics of target audience by finding their photos of a CD or interests associated with a specific genre of music. “A person’s music preference tells what kind of person she/he is,” said Psychology Professor Adrian North, who found surprisingly tight similarities between music genre and personality. The in-depth insights of target audience’s personalities could also help development professionals to cultivate relationship with donors in a more personal way.

From the audience’s perspective, the Graph Search could help them discover like-minded friends and create new groups. Given art is an expression of the human condition, the most intelligent sources of information about desired experiences come from people’s friends rather than web searching engines. Google may tell the information about an exhibition while Graph Search helps you find the right person to go to a show with. For example, if you like contemporary art while most of your friends do not, you could easily find like-minded friends by searching “People who like contemporary art and live nearby”; consequently, a new group will be created to share your experiences about contemporary arts.

Even as an early product, Graph Search shows a completely new way to get information on Facebook. It could have an increasing impact on the way we find, consume and share arts.

If you want to start using the new feature, you can sign up for the beta by heading here.