For marketers, it's important to understand what customers think about specific topics related to their business. A deeper understanding of what potential customers are talking about will only help to create a more targeted marketing message and provide valuable insight to a business.
With this goal in mind, Facebook announced the rollout of a new tool for marketers. Topic Data will let advertisers see what their customers are saying about "events, brands, subjects, and activities" so that they can "make better decisions about how they market on Facebook and other channels."
While this data has always been available through third party tools, Facebook claims that those sample sizes were often too small to be significant for advertisers and that getting an accurate understanding of customer demographics was "nearly impossible". By using Topic Data, marketers will now be able to better measure conversations and "get a holistic and actionable view of their audience for the first time."
Examples of how Topic Data can help marketers:
- A business selling a hair de-frizzing product can see demographics on the people talking about humidity's effects on their hair to better understand their target audience.
- A fashion retailer can see the clothing items its target audience is talking about to decide which products to stock.
- A brand can see how people are talking about their brand or industry to measure brand sentiment.
While Topic Data cannot be used to target ads directly, it could certainly be used to gain more insight into how to target your ads. Facebook also addressed potential privacy concerns:
Like other insights information on Facebook, all of the information used for topic data is anonymized and aggregated. We are not disclosing personally identifying information to anyone, including our partners and marketers. And the results delivered to marketers are analyses and interpretations of the information, not actual topic data.
For now, Topic Data will only be available to select DataSift partners in the US and UK. Facebook plans to expand availability in the future after seeing how this new data gets used, adding that "our plan is to iterate on topic data thoughtfully and deliberately, and look to expand its availability at a later date.