Looking for pictures of Spain from before the year 1970 on Facebook? Graph Search can help you answer impossible searches like these. Facebook’s Graph Search rolled out earlier this year in March and it immediately hit the digital marketing world with a storm. With this new feature, marketers can now understand their customers and prospects better than ever before.
What is Graph Search? It is essentially Facebook’s very own Google search network that allows users to find content within Facebook much more easily. By gathering data from billions of users and external sources, it is essentially a library of everything on Facebook.
Looking at just how rich this database is, there are many creative ways we can use this to better our marketing efforts. Here are five ways to get started.
1. Figuring Out Your Audience’s Interests
The first step of any marketing effort is to understand the personas of your audience, especially their interests. Knowing this will allow you to produce content that will resonate most with the target audience.
This is made extremely simple with Facebook’s Graph Search. Simply type in “Interests of People Who Like <Page Name>,” and Facebook will return to you a list of interests that are most common with your audience.
Why is this important? Conducting this search can give you deep insights into what your audience likes. You can then incorporate these insights into your marketing messages, allowing you to connect more effectively with your audience.
2. Going Deeper to Figure Out Your Audience’s Precise Interests
The example above showed that people who “like” Nike tend to like Music. This is definitely insightful by itself, but we can get an even deeper understanding by looking into what type of music they like.
Type in “<Interest Name> liked by people who like <Page Name> ” and you will get a list of a particular subcategory of interests that your audiences like.
Why is this important? There are several applications for this. If you found out that many of your fans are also fans of music, specifically Rihanna, then perhaps it would be a good idea to have you contest prize to be free tickets to a Rihanna or Lil’ Wayne concert.
3. Figuring Out the Groups Your Audience Participates In
Often, posting on Facebook alone might not be enough and more outreach efforts is needed in order to gain fans and strike up interactions. Facebook groups may be worth venturing into instead, as there are many active groups where you can engage with potential customers.
Type in “Groups joined by people who like <Page Name>,” and you will see a list of groups that fans of your page have joined. Browse through this list and see which ones you can begin participating in.
Why is this important? Sometimes, participating in groups can be a great way to get your brand’s name out into relevant communities. This may help you gain more traffic and fans to your page.
4. Identifying More Useful Insights About Competitors and Your Audience
Typing in “Pages liked by people who like <Page Name>” is a great way to potentially assess some of your competitors and find some pages that your fans like. By looking at this list, you can not only gain further insights as to your audience’s interests, but also insights as to what types of pages they like and observe what your closest social media competitors are doing.
Why is this important? This can give you even further insights about your audience. For instance, not only do we know that fans of Nike are Starbucks Coffee drinkers, but that they are likely to be users of Twitter. Another insight is that in terms of other brands on social media, Adidas and Lacoste are your closest competitors.
The Graph Search is still new and evolving, as Facebook is continuously adding more features to it. It’s really exciting to think about the future possibilities with this feature; perhaps allowing users to conduct an analysis on the types of posts that our fans like or conducting a search of common hashtags that our fans are using.
As marketers, we should be quick to embrace this new search tool and begin finding creative ways to use them. They can be extremely helpful in streamlining our messaging strategy. What are some ways that Graph Search has helped or will help your marketing efforts?