If you know more about your fans, can you optimize your Facebook content strategy? Most would answer ‘YES’. Wondering how to do it? With the help of all new ‘Facebook Graph Search’.

Let’s start with exploring our personal profiles. What are the insights that we can derive out of Graph Search? Just place your cursor on top of your Facebook Home Page in the Search bar. You will be able to see

What is facebook graph search

You can also find the groups your friends have joined, the apps & games your friends have used and a lot more. Now let’s get on to, how marketers can use Graph Search to derive insights out of it and optimize their Facebook Content Strategy.

How to use Facebook Graph Search?

Type the page of your name or in fact, the name of any page in the Graph Search Bar and prefix it with ‘People who like’. This will give you the list of people who liked that particular page. Generally, the list would start with people in your friends list, then friends of your friends and then it will proceed on to others as well based on your chain of connections. This activity would give you an idea what set of people liked this particular page and why. If it’s your own page, you can check if they’re the right set of audience for your brand with the help of their profile information.

How to know more about my facebook fans?
If they’re the right ones, then no worries. You can work on to understand more about them with the help of following steps. If the people who’ve liked your brand page are not the right set of target audience, then you might have to rework on your Facebook Ad strategy to bring in more relevant audience to your page. If you find it difficult to identify them, you might want to have a look at what your competitors are up to and what set of audiences they’ve gained for their page. Just type the name of your competitor’s Facebook page and prefix it with ‘People who like’. You never know? The competitor also might not have the right set of target audience. That’s when the filters come into picture. Once graph search produces results, check out the top right column of the page, which will have these filters. Select the options according to your business and you will be able to find the right set of people.

How to use filters in Graph Search?

Let’s now get on to know more about our fans.

Prefixing the page name with the phrase ‘Favorite Interests of People who liked’ – will give you the interests of the people who liked your page. You can do this activity for your competitor’s page, identify the interests of the fans, use the keywords in your Facebook ads and can bring in a lot of them to your page.

How to find the interests of my target audience?

The interests can also help you frame your content strategy or come up with interesting campaigns. For eg. If majority of your fans like cricket, you can try to align your product/service with cricket and come with interesting campaigns. Another eg. If most of the people are engineers, you can share some engineer relevant jokes along with the ‘Brand-connect’ factor to engage this segment of audience. Like wise, more and more digging into the interests of your fans will give deeper insights on how to engage with them.

Prefixing the page name with ‘People who likes’ and suffixing the page name with ‘also liked’ – Will give you the list of pages liked by the fans of the page you’ve mentioned.

Prefixing the name of your industry with ‘Groups about’ – Gives you the list of groups associated or relevant to your industry. You can join in these groups, share interesting content, engage with the fans and eventually create a interest in them to turn them into your customers. For example, if you are in the business of selling fashion related stuffs, the phrase ‘Groups about fashion’ in the Facebook Graph Search will give you the list of active Fashion groups. Then you can use the filters towards the right hand, to sort the group by country or region.

Using the phrase ‘Pages liked by people above age 25 and below age 30′ – Will give you the list of pages liked by the people in the particular age bracket. For example. If you are in the business who target audience is in the age category of 25 -30, the phrase used before makes more sense. It will help you identify the interests of your target audience and align your content strategy accordingly.

Facebook ‘Graph Search’ is wonderful. It’s all about the right phrases we use in it, to derive the best insights out of it. Now let me know what you think about Graph Search and how do you want to use it?