Not long ago, Facebook announced release of topic data. But what is that? Topic data is somehow a new way for brands to better understand their visitors and audiences through daily activity on Facebook. With Facebook topic data you can tap in and analyse what almost 1.40 billion people are chatting on that platform. It’s logical that marketers or business owners are interested in understanding and learning what users are thinking about topics that are related to them. This gives them more insight to know type of products they can make. Usually in not so distant past marketers had to look what was shared online to have an idea what is it that people care about having. But back then, the information that they got was pretty much limited. Basically topic data serves to show what are users on Facebook saying about brand, activities, subject and events, but still keeping their personal information private.
With topic data you can build a road maps for product. For example. Retailer for fashion can see about what kind of clothing items users are talking so with the knowledge of that they start to produce those kind of products to have them in stock. Even though this is not something really new, as this kind of data was available even before to third parties, it was almost impossible to determine demographics. Now, with the topic data you can strip personal information from activity of Facebook and get a glimpses inside all the activity revolving around one topic. I have to say that while topic data can provide guidance to marketers this doesn’t mean it can actually be used for direct ad targeting. Like many other information and insights, the topic data information is aggregated and anonymized. People are using many social networks for many different needs and in many different ways, but still it’s possible to generalize the usage.
Interacting on Facebook is much about your family and friends and the mutual or individual interest you are sharing with others. Social networks are consisted from a mix of data that is both unstructured and structured. On various social networks, the raw data is unstructured – 80% actually, and structured is 20% which means it’s very challenging to make insight extraction from platforms. But Facebook is slowly changing this. They have data that is much more structured then data from any other social network. This means Facebook allows better advertising, discovery, recommendation and exploration.
If you are in any case a marketer, with topic data you are getting much deeper understanding of people’s interests as well as them as individuals, so you can tailor the great experience for your audience. When you are looking at topic data on Facebook, you can empower your brand and make smarter decisions when it comes to marketing.
