profile building with facebook graph search

How to: Build the perfect customer profile for your business model

For the modern business, tapping in to Facebook’s 1 billion users is an essential part of their marketing strategy. The accuracy of profiles and user activity enables marketers to target specific and useful demographics. The current Facebook model relies on upon user intuition; businesses are expected to rely solely on the inbound strength of their page.

Facebook’s new update is an evolution into ‘social searching’. Using the huge catalogue of data that has been gathering since its introduction in 2000, Facebook has opened a new dimension for marketers to understand and extend their contacts.

G vs F

The SEO dilemma between Google and Facebook is caused by the inconsistency of indexed material. Google has full authority to catalogue the content, links and comments of fan and business pages; however, it is unable to crawl other metrics such as shares and likes on social sites. Most users have privacy settings on their pages meaning Google is unable to index personal wall data and groups. Filling this void is graph search which lets you into the gritty social activity that only Facebook has access to. It is a social history directory of 1 billion Facebook users turning the personal interaction between friends, groups and pages into functional data.

Graph Search will develop into a tool for market research gaining you access into the social history of users connected with your business. Using this data, you can’t start to develop a profile of your ideal consumer built from their personal activity. Similarly, drafting a profile built from the users outside of your network who wish to interact with your product can help you identify how to increase your brand awareness.

Another use for the Facebook Graph Search is the slightly sneaky competitive research.

"Holiday agencies delivering ski packages for ages 21-30”

Accessing companies similar to your own will enable you to analyse key marketing strategies deployed on a social level; measure the variation, demographic and location for potential customers; determine where your competitors locate their socially active customer. 

Social Responsibility 

However, as with all innovative rollouts in their beta stages, (as Graph Search is) an utmost degree of responsibility needs to be upheld. Mass spamming, targeting outside your demographic and robotic content will all work against you. There is no use in graph search for targeting customers who like a vaguely similar product to your own, or operate outside your brand access. Graph search is a tool you can use to identify improvements that can be made to your own strategy based on qualitative data. Facebook is primarily a personal network and marketers need to navigate the Graph Search engine in respect of the user.

It should be noted that the accuracy of the data collated by Facebook can’t be conveniently sorted between genuine and misleading. Pages are liked, shared and linked ironically, personal settings are invaded by friends, and users don’t consistently update their pages. Plenty of the data the graph search engine will categorise won’t be an accurate reflection of a user; this will make building an accurate customer profile that little bit more difficult. However, the advantages of being able to place your consumers and understand their characters inside the largest social network will generate huge opportunities for your business.