Brand marketers that use social media listening tools may think they have no shortage of data to go to when they need customer insights—posts, likes, shares and links are a great way to get a better understanding of your audience. However, there’s one source of data that your social stack is missing: Facebook topic data.
Facebook is one of the world’s biggest sources of public opinion. Up until now you’ve likely had visibility of the engagement around your own company page and this is just a drop in the ocean considering the global audience on Facebook. This is the past. Facebook topic data—which offers insights into what your audience is passionate about—is now a reality.
DataSift provides marketers with these insights by aggregating and anonymizing topic data, opening the doors to billions of daily interactions from consumers on Facebook in a privacy-safe way. You can now have visibility into how people are interacting around topics related to your brand—or a competitor’s. Insights from Facebook topic data are already transforming how marketers make decisions across the globe. Creative strategies are being refined, new audiences are being discovered and messaging is being tailored to better resonate with target audiences – the possibilities are endless.
“Facebook topic data is a valuable asset for agencies,” says Dave DeMarsh, president, KBM Group, part of the Wunderman network. “Data-driven insights have the power to reshape campaigns across the board, from creative to PR, communications and media strategies. By tapping into aggregated data in real-time, agencies have the ability to shape the direction or timing of a campaign and discover current information about target audiences.”
Consider these examples of how brands have discovered the previously undiscoverable using Facebook topic data:
1. Snacking on surprising insights
A popular snack brand was looking to improve social engagement and promote its brand around pre-game sports excitement but needed more accurate information on its assumed target audience—under 25 and male. The company’s ad agency leveraged Facebook topic data to find a surprising twist: The most engaging demographic was actually women between 35 and 64, and pre-game excitement did not peak just before game time, but almost six hours earlier.
With these new insights the agency was able to develop better creative for the more relevant audience, and time its ads to run six hours before game time in order to capture the audience’s anticipation—a quick change that would have taken months to identify via focus groups.
2. Writing the script with Facebook topic data
Producers of a popular TV show wanted to scour references to its episodes, quotes, memes and characters to determine which were resonating most with people on Facebook. Using anonymous, aggregated topic data, they were able to determine which breakout actors should be retained for future seasons, accurately judge popular storylines to dictate future writing and discover the level of engagement around certain characters or scenes to better promote the show.
By analyzing how engagement around characters changed across different demographic groups—age, gender and state—the producers were also able to better promote the show to these groups across states.
3. Engaging music lovers
An ad tech company was looking for ways to increase its video completion rates for a major music festival. Topic data helped the company understand how different audiences were engaging with the artists featured at the festival and its sponsors. Analyzing more than 5.7 million social interactions on Facebook provided enough insight to significantly adjust its campaign—increasing video completion rates by 17 percent.
Using topic data, the ad tech company found that women aged 25 to 34 in Indiana, Michigan and Kentucky over-indexed for engagement with topics associated with the festival by five times the national average. As such, the organization was able to quickly determine which other interests, websites, retailers and broadcasters these segments were engaging with and adjusted its advertising campaign accordingly.
These are just a few of the many ways that Facebook topic data is shaping new strategies for brands, agencies and TV producers alike. Take a closer look at Facebook topic data to see what these insights—gleaned from billions of social interactions—can do for your brand.
