This past Monday Facebook announced improvements to their recently launched Graph Search. The platform now allows for posts and status updates to be part of Graph Search results. Users will now be able to search content like “…updates, photo captions, checkins and comments” to find things that are shared with the user or brand.
When new features are rolled out, usually one of our first questions is: what does this mean for marketers?
Social media managers are consistently sifting through conversations and topics their audience is talking about. Unless those conversations directly involve your brand, it’s challenging to identify subjects to develop content.
Current tools are excellent at pinpointing those who are already mentioning your brand on Facebook, but what about reaching out to potential new audiences? How does one identify those interested in your specific niche, industry or offering?
The new Facebook feature makes it much easier for social media marketers to search for topics or genres surrounding your brand principles, based on a few factors. Here are the changes that were released:
1. Facebook Graph Search for Key Terms / Topics
This is probably the most exciting feature of the new roll out for Graph Search. Now brands can search for topics or key terms if they aren’t directly “mentioned” on Facebook.
Social marketers can gain insights on information that resonates with their audience or industry and get insights on any topic, even competitors.
2. Search by Location
Now, Graph Search will pick up posts geographically, such as posts about a city or place. This is an amazing tool for brands seeking information about cities, especially if they are developing a campaign targeted at a specific area. Also, community mangers can sift through information such as “Posts Written in Toronto, Ontario” to see what his happening around town and then develop content to support popular topics to increase engagement.
Another use of this tool is to pinpoint in-store experiences with brands. Facebook will allow you to search for terms like “Posts written at The Keg at Byward Market Ottawa”, where brands can be more granular at analyzing what customers are saying about their time interacting with them.
3. Search by Time
If you’re running an event, or a campaign that lasts several weeks, you can look back at the data instead of sifting through your timeline. Now Graph Search allows social media marketers to pick up posts from a specific timeframe.
For example, one could search “Posts written at the Whitehouse last month”. Data by nature is dynamic. With Facebook releasing these new features marketers can now mine for data after the interactions have happened online. Now, reporting to clients can be much more efficient and accurate with access to back-dated engagements.
4. Search your own content
Any community manager knows that it’s easy to lose track of all of the conversations that are started on a Facebook page. Now, users are able to search their own posts and comments, which allows for more diligent responses if they are missed as well as conversations they were a part of. Examples of searches could be “posts I commented on” or “my posts from last year.”
As Facebook makes the move into providing more social media data, marketing managers need to bring this information into their marketing arsenal. It’s refreshing seeing Facebook make sense of data that is otherwise hard to capture.
If you would like to chat about how these new features could be applied to your own social media marketing efforts, and how Source Metrics might be able to help contact us, we’d love to hear from you!
[ Image via Facebook ]
