How To Use Facebook Graph Search

Yesterday I gave you a handy Facebook Checklist to help you maximize the effectiveness of your Facebook Fan Page.

One of the items on the list makes reference to using Facebook Graph Search to determine what type of content your Fans are interested in.

Posting relevant content on your Fan page is even more important now that Facebook has made organic reach more difficult.

Today I’ll be showing you how to use Graph Search to do just that.

First, let’s look at was Facebook Graph Search is.

Facebook Graph Search is basically Facebook’s search engine, allowing users to user “natural language” to search for topics that interest them.

Here’s an example. I’m an avid hiker, and I am always on the search for new trails in my local area. An easy way to find that information is to log on to Facebook and use graph search to see what information is available for hiking in my area.

 

 

As you can see, one of the suggestions is, in fact, hiking in new brunswick. Clicking on that link brings me to a page with wealth of information of hiking in my area.

 

 

I also have the option of looking at not only Posts, but People, Photos, Pages and Places. And by clicking on the “More” tab, I can also view Groups, Apps and Events.

So, now that we know what Facebook Graph Search is, how do we, as business owners, use it to our advantage.

Using Facebook Graph Search For Business

When posting on Facebook, it’s important to be relevant. One of the ways of doing this is learning what your Facebook followers are interested in. Luckily, Facebook Graph Search makes this easy for us.

Here’s how to do it.

Open up facebook (make sure you are using Facebook as yourself, not your Fan page) and you’ll see the Facebook Graph Search bar, asking you to search for “people, places and things”.

 

 

Now, instead of searching for things that we like, we want to search for things that our Fans like. So we are gong to type something like “Favourite interests of people who like <your fan page name>.

We we do this, we’ll see something like this …

 

 

This gives us a very good insight into what our fans are interested in, and we can create Facebook posts based on this information.

Here are a few other searches you can do …

• Favourite pages of fans who like <your fan page name>
• Groups joined by fans of <your fan page name>
• Apps used by people who like <your fan page name>
• Places visited by people who like <your fan page name>

Of course, these are just a few examples of what you can search for. I encourage you to experiment with searches to see how you can engage your fans.

Are you using Facebook Graph Search? What searches are you using to gain insight into your fan base?