Facebook has recently introduced access to data that will provide insights on who is saying what about anything on Facebook…but keeping it all anonymous.
This new data mining service for marketers and advertisers is called Topic Data. Marketers will be able to scrape user posts for keywords and phrases so they can home in on their target audience. It’s important to note that marketers will not be able to target ads directly, but Topic Data means decision-grade data that will help marketers with their strategies and roadmaps.
Facebook is leveraging a platform to keep the data actionable, scalable and anonymous through a partnership with DataSift. Facebook is promising their advertisers that Topic Data will mean ‘actionable insights’, and DataSift appears to be the right choice claiming they enable companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from public social conversations. The partner has as their tagline that they, “Translate data into action with the privacy-first Human Data platform”.
Topic Data is in beta, so Facebook is only available to a limited number of UK and US DataSift clients. The data Facebook is making available is also limited. The roll out will expand after Facebook can determine that Topic Data is indeed useful to marketers. Hopefully later this year the beta program will be available to a wider audience. Position2 will keep you posted.
If you are interested in Facebook advertising, Contact Position². We manage and scale Facebook advertising for super-ambitious brands!
