What are Facebook’s 400 Million users saying about you? There is nothing more valuable than a word-of-mouth recommendation to a friend and a lot of these conversations are happening on Facebook. Find out what 400 Million Facebook users are saying about you, your company, brand, product or industry in real time. Moreover, find out how to use this free tool and the information on it for your social media marketing campaign. Keep reading.
It is called the Facebook Open Search. It allows you to track, in real time, what people are saying about anything on Facebook. It shows you the conversation, what people are posting and more. I compare it to a Twitter search. The difference is that people tend to post more personal messages on Facebook because the message can be longer than 140 characters. On Twitter you cannot get much out of what someone is saying in 140 characters and the speed at which those messages travel seems to be significantly faster.
Open Facebook Search shown above will show you what people are saying about you, your business or your industry in real time on Facebook. You can also post the search results on your blog or website like I’ve done to my sidebar on this page. If you look, you will notice that I’m tracking what people are saying on Facebook about “social media.” There are a number of uses for this function, here are some functions I’ve used this tool for so far:
- Reputation management - Lets say you are your company are all about social media optimization for business. You obviously want to be in the conversation shown in this search. This gets you thinking about what keywords you want to focus on showing up for in a social search. If your business is in SEO you probably want to be showing up in this real time search a couple times a day. Figure out if your reputation is in the right direction, are people saying positive things or negative things? Are you even showing up in your keyword? If not, tweak your campaign so you do show up if that is a goal for you.
- Social Media Audience Research- Lets say you are in the business of Social Media Optimization, SMO, and you want to market your services company and business to people that might need it. You can monitor and track what people are saying about your keyword “SMO” to see what people are saying about it. You may also want to try searching “social media” as your prospective clients may not always be keen to use abbreviations like “SMO”. Figure out what your audience is saying using this tool.
- Product and Competitor Research - Figure our what people are saying about their products. What do they like, dislike. This can be used as a very valuable research tool to help you figure out what is working and what isn’t. On the same note, you can use this tool to see what people are saying about your competitors. This can provide insights into what others, feel, think, and connect with within a brand, identity, or company. Seeing these relationships can give you insight into their competitive advantage because you can see what the customers are saying. By seeing what they are saying, you can see how they are connecting with their customers. Knowing this can help you create your strategy to connect and compete in the digital space.
Those are just a couple ways you can use this tool. There are obviously more and I’m sure there are other social searching tools but this one has been useful for me so far with regard to my Facebook audience for me and my clients.
What do you think of this tool? How else can we use it for social media optimization?
