If your business is not on Facebook yet, what are you waiting for? Facebook for business is a great way to connect with customers on a social level and encourage them to help spread the word about your business to their friends and family in their own social network. However, with the new Graph Search feature, Facebook affords you much more insights to your reach and information about your customers than you can imagine. The best thing about it is that access to Graph Search data is completely free and does not require any advertising dollars spent whatsoever.
How Does Facebook Graph Search Work?
Facebook’s graph search has gone through some recent changes that are quite revolutionary. Since Facebook is all about what people like, the graph search can grant you access to many dimensions of what Facebook users like. Facebook users do not necessarily have to even be in your followers or friends network to show up in search results; and that is the beauty of it: access to new potential customers to target. You can search multi-dimensional things like “friends who live in Denver and like skiing” on a more personal level; but a business in Denver that sells skiing supplies can use it to search something like “people who live in Denver and like skiing” and then target that segment. Once you do find new customers to target, you can then spend advertising dollars on Facebook wisely because their advertising options allow you to get extremely specific on who you target. Their ad targeting features are being updated and added to all the time. Once you find segments, it is very easy to set up ad campaigns on Facebook to target specific people based on combinations of their likes, their location, and their Facebook activity. Another great thing to know about advertising on Facebook is that you can set daily or monthly budgets as low as $5 or $10 per day so you can just test out a few things and then expand on what works.
7 Example Facebook Graph Searches
The important thing to remember is that when you learn about the common interests for many of the people who already like your page, then you can infer that other people who like that might also like your company and you can develop ads targeting them based on that knowledge. Here are 7 example searches and how they can be applied to finding new customers for your business. Remember to play around with the graph search and see what other new information you can gather from it for your specific business.
- “People who like your business and . . . “ The possibilities here are pretty endless here, but you can use your imagination to cater this to apply to your business. It also gives you some insight into what many or most of your Facebook fans like. The missing keyword(s) after the “and” can be a brand, hobby, interest, television show, etc.
- “People who like your business and live . . . “ This graph search will show you where the people who like your page live. Another nifty search option similar to this is instead of using a city or state, you can use a location. Location based offers can then be served to those people that grab their attention such as “people who like your business and live near Vail Ski Resorts” or “people who like your business and live near Dolphin’s Sunlife Stadium”. You can see how these types of searches can help you target people that might be interested in products or services related to the locations they might frequent.
- “Places visited by people who like your business”. This is a variation on the above search but is an important demographic to learn about because it means that they travel, have an income level that allows them to travel, and you also then know where they travel to. It can also help you expand to other graph searches to find additional related information.
- “People who like your business are . . . “ These types of search options can be used to find people who are certain ages, marital status, gender, or a number of other demographic information that Facebook collects about its users. You can modify the search to include multiple dimensions such as “men over 21” or “women under 30” or any other dimension that would be a segment that your business would want to target.
- “Games played by people who like your business”. This search will return a segment of people that you can get your ads in front of when they are a captive audience. If you have not become addicted to any of the thousands of Facebook games out there, then you don’t know that they often make players watch ads before continuing or as an incentive to gain game advantages. You are delivering ads to one of the most captive audiences, many of whom spend hours devoting their undivided attention to these games.
- “Apps used by people who like your business”. This search gives you more information about your customer base and that knowledge allows you to explore other targeting options and learn more about your target customers. If a large number of people who like your page use a certain application, you can use that to target other people who use and even like that application.
- “Groups about . . .” This particular search should be a ‘no brianer’! People who join groups on Facebook have a definite and specific interest; you can use that to your advantage by sending ads targeted at people who are in groups relating to your products, services, brand, or location.