Sometimes the most fun I have with columns is when I spend hours just searching for stuff. Here, I searched for user interests on Facebook and had some fun, especially when I decided to drill down to the political leanings of Hannah Montana fans, and then see how Montana-based fans of Hannah Montana compared with Indiana-based fans of Indiana Jones. And as you might expect, while dozens of the searches are represented here, dozens more didn't make the final cut. The column's below and continues in the extended entry; it was originally published at MediaPost.
Searching Facebook by the Numbers
On Facebook, the marketers can now search for the searchers. Facebook’s Aditya Agarwal claimed in July that 600 million searches are performed on the site monthly. Compared to comScore numbers discussed in a previous column,
that makes Facebook a more popular search engine than MySpace,
Mapquest, AOL, and Ask.com. Facebook claims it’s “the most used people
search engine.” That’s great for consumers, but marketers can search
for people in a different way.
Marketers can search Facebook’s audience for ad targeting with its Flyers Pro ads,
a self-service cost-per-click (CPC) ad format; advertisers can take
part for as little as $1 per day. As John Battelle summarizes the
potential on his blog, it’s
like Google’s “AdSense driven not by search queries, but by personal
profile. It could be a major, major new platform, if we, as a culture,
take to it. It’s not a given, but it’s a very compelling vision.”
When scoping out a Flyers Pro campaign, you can see how many people
on Facebook meet the targeting criteria you enter. You can even search
Facebook for the users who post certain interests on their profiles.
Using the Flyer metrics, you can discern that fans of Hannah Montana
are disproportionately less likely to be liberal compared to the
overall Facebook population, while “Colbert Report” fans include far
more declared conservatives than “Daily Show” fans. You’ll see that
tallegiance to the Red Sox is more than double than those who admit to
rooting for the Yankees — but the Red Sox are no match for the Red Hot
Chili Peppers.
Here’s a snapshot of the Facebook audience that you can target through Flyers Pro.