Being vis­i­ble on Face­book is increas­ing­ly get­ting more dif­fi­cult for brands. Face­book’s new algo­rithms iden­ti­fy and sup­press “less valu­able” posts brands share and rewards those shar­ing con­tent that real­ly speaks to an audi­ence. If you want to be vis­i­ble on Face­book, then you have to make sure your audi­ence craves the con­tent you’re cre­at­ing. Oth­er­wise, Face­book won’t even show it to your audi­ence. That’s why it’s crit­i­cal to under­stand what your audi­ence wants.

Luck­i­ly Face­book itself pro­vides infor­ma­tion that can help you get to know your audi­ence. Audi­ence Insights and the Looka­like Audi­ence fea­ture are a cou­ple of ways to get start­ed.

This arti­cle will focus on a “hid­den” source, one that most peo­ple know is there, but don’t use often enough: Graph Search.

There’s a lot you can do with Graph Search to find infor­ma­tion about your tar­get audi­ence. Smart search­es will reveal a lot of valu­able infor­ma­tion about your audi­ence’s inter­ests. Recent changes have made it a lit­tle bit more dif­fi­cult, but you can still get to know your audi­ence bet­ter with the help of Face­book search.

How Does Graph Search Work?

Before you can start research­ing you have to under­stand how Graph Search works. Graph Search isn’t a nor­mal search engine. It’s social search, based on the graph with­in Face­book. This means that there is a big eye for the con­nec­tions and rela­tion­ships between peo­ple and enti­ties.

When Face­book first rolled out Graph Search, this was the main focus of Facebook’s search: search through con­nec­tions. In the lat­est update Face­book also made the posts search­able, mak­ing the expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ent and much more focused on what is being said instead of the con­nec­tions. How­ev­er, using the dif­fer­ent tabs with­in Face­book Search and the right fil­ter sen­tences still allows you to see a lot of the infor­ma­tion from inside the Graph.

An impor­tant thing you need to know is that we are using search fil­ters based on sen­tences. By ask­ing Face­book ques­tions you can get the right infor­ma­tion out.

That is exact­ly what we’ll be doing. Let’s dive in!

What Are Your Audience’s Interests?

To be able to post the right things, we want to know what our audi­ence likes – what are their inter­ests? By search­ing “Favorite inter­ests of peo­ple who like [page­name]” you will see inter­ests that the peo­ple who like your page have told Face­book.

“Inter­ests” are what Face­book users add to their pro­files. It will give you an insight on what they feel is impor­tant to them.

Say I’m a mar­ket­ing man­ag­er for Coca-Cola. When I would search for “Inter­ests liked by peo­ple who like Coca-Cola”, I would get a list of search results back. The results starts with the search results of my friends talk­ing about any of the terms men­tioned, but I am most inter­est­ed in the inter­ests of the peo­ple, so I will click on “See More” to see the inter­ests of peo­ple.

From here you can start fil­ter­ing. Face­book used to have easy fil­ter­ing options, unfor­tu­nate­ly their last update removed those options, so we’ll need to use small workarounds, using the right sen­tences.

The first thing I want to make sure of is that my own friends don’t influ­ence the results I see too much, thus I want to fil­ter them out. To do this I will adapt my search to: “Inter­ests liked by peo­ple who are not my friends and like Coca-Cola”

Now notice that my friends will still show up as part of the group that like cer­tain things, but doing the search like this gives me a clear­er view.

What Can I Do With This Search?

As a con­tent mar­keter or social mar­keter you want con­tent to spread and reach the right audi­ence. But you also want to get some­thing out of it. For that you want to find that exact cross­ing point between what you have to say and what your audi­ence wants to hear. In this case you can use the inter­ests to find an over­lap.

Let me give you an exam­ple: I can see here that peo­ple who like Coca-Cola are also inter­est­ed in choco­late and pho­tog­ra­phy. This gives me a few con­tent ideas to work with:

• Maybe I could search for pic­tures of peo­ple drink­ing Coca-Cola and eat­ing choco­late, or empha­size what oth­er things are good to eat with a Coke.
• Both Coca-Cola and choco­late have a lot of calo­ries in them, maybe high­light­ing Coca-Cola Light here is an option.
• Focus­ing more on the pho­tog­ra­phy part, I could ask my audi­ence to share their most beau­ti­ful pic­tures of a Coke bot­tle, and share my own;

Just like that, three ideas to work with!

What Other Pages Do People Like?

More data that is inter­est­ing for me is to find out what oth­er pages peo­ple like.

By search­ing “Pages liked by peo­ple who like Coca-Cola” you will get an overview of oth­er pages that peo­ple who liked your page liked.

It is essen­tial here that you look beyond the obvi­ous. Be sure to scroll down to find inter­est­ing pages, and again use the fil­ter option of elim­i­nat­ing your friends from the list to be sure you aren’t in your own “bub­ble.”

A search like this can help you get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of your audi­ence, to again make the right updates, but also for exam­ple to find out what pages to inter­act with, or where to adver­tise.

Narrowing It Down

All this gives me some basic infor­ma­tion about my (or in this case Coca-Cola’s) audi­ence. But we might want to be more spe­cif­ic. We want to know who these peo­ple are. Can we per­son­al­ize our mes­sage to them?

A sim­ple search gets us under­way.

This search above can be made even more spe­cif­ic. Think back on the choco­late inter­est we found amongst Coca-Cola fans ear­li­er. We might want to know exact­ly who those peo­ple are.

There are dif­fer­ent vari­eties on this search:

• “Peo­ple who like Coca-Cola and live in Ams­ter­dam, Nether­lands” will get me an overview of Coca-Cola fans in Ams­ter­dam.
• “Peo­ple who like Coca-Cola and major in Edu­ca­tion” will give me peo­ple who like Coca-Cola and have stud­ied edu­ca­tion, so who might be teach­ers.
• “Restau­rants in Ams­ter­dam, Nether­lands liked by peo­ple who like Coca-Cola” will give you a list of restau­rants Coca-Cola’s fans likes.
• “Musi­cians liked by peo­ple who like Coca-Cola” will show you what musi­cians and bands they like.
• “Cur­rent coca cola employ­ees who like hors­es” will show you the peo­ple who work at Coca-Cola and who like hors­es.

But there are many more. Find those that fit your brand.

Like with the oth­er search­es, these make you under­stand bet­ter how to tar­get your audi­ence, but it will also help you more by under­stand­ing where to find part­ner­ships and where to phys­i­cal­ly be present. Doing the right search­es might pre­vent your from being in the wrong place at the wrong time and might help you be in the right place at the right time.

It can also be use­ful in your out­reach to know the inter­ests and likes of peo­ple work­ing at a cer­tain com­pa­ny.

Use The Navigation Bar To Find Groups, Events And More

Now let’s look at the nav­i­ga­tion bar above the search results. A search for “Peo­ple who like Coca-Cola” can be fil­tered down into the cat­e­gories Face­book presents. This will allow you to see the groups your audi­ence is part of, the events they are going to, and even pho­tos they took, for exam­ple.

The Freaky Level

Before I let you go to work, I want to also point out the “freaky lev­el” of Graph Search. Because of the way Graph Search works, you can do some inter­est­ing search­es that will give you some stun­ning results – results that will show you some con­nec­tions you might not be aware of, or in some cas­es maybe don’t even want to know. But they could be use­ful in some ways.

Take for exam­ple the search “Peo­ple who like Pep­si and work at Coca-Cola”. This will show you which peo­ple at Coca-Cola actu­al­ly “like“ their com­peti­tor.

Now this is fair­ly inno­cent (though if you try this with oth­er brands you can find some very fun­ny results), but we can make it more excit­ing.

Did you know you could see which of your fans are divorced, for exam­ple?

Or which of the peo­ple work­ing at Coca-Cola are divorced?

Or which of those are on the dat­ing cir­cuit?

It could even uncov­er infor­ma­tion that some might not want to have out there:

It can get quite per­son­al, because each of those search­es will give you a list of peo­ple you can each tar­get very specif­i­cal­ly. I’m not urg­ing you to aim for the “weird” search­es; you just have to be aware of them.

Start Getting To Know Your Audience Now

These are just a few sim­ple search­es to start get­ting to know your audi­ence, but you can take it as broad as you want. There are many more search­es you can do to find out a lot of things about your audi­ence. The chal­lenge is not get­ting lost and find­ing the crossover between you and your audi­ence so you can cre­ate the right con­tent at the right time to make that con­nec­tion.

Real­ly try and play with this and find out a lot about your audi­ence and your com­peti­tors’ audi­ence on Face­book. And let me know how that goes!

Are you already using Face­book search to learn about your audi­ence’s inter­ests?