How to use Facebook to grow your business
As developers at Facebook starting rolling out a new beta feature for the social hub that could be a boon for marketers.
Facebook Graph Search returns search results based on the people, maps, images and social activities within a person’s social network. If a friend has “liked” or “tagged” a favorite restaurant, the result would instantly show in a search for “restaurants my friends have been to.”
For product marketers, the new feature could enable them to target their advertising by pairing ads with search results, and because the search results are based on pages that one’s friends have mentioned, products are being introduced to new potential customers with every search. A person searching for “friends who like photography” might also be served an ad for Canon cameras, for instance.
“With this, Facebook is showcasing specific trends by using information from your Facebook, from your network,” says Shelly Palmer, author of “Digital Wisdom: Thought Leadership for a Connected World.” “Nothing is hypothetical or a guess about the information that Facebook is giving you.”
Company pages that have accumulated at least 30 likes receive analytical information through the Facebook Insights feature. The Insights information tells page managers how many likes the page received during a specific time, or how many people have seen or clicked on a link posted on the page. Insights also provides demographic information of the page’s visitors.
“People go to Facebook to learn — about other people, other brands, their friends. And as a brand, you should think the same way,” says Jeremy Epstein, vice president of marketing at Sprinklr, a social media management company based in New York that works with large companies such as Samsung, Virgin America and Dell.
