Facebook Market Research Secrets
Over the last week I've published a number of different demographic slices of the Facebook Market. Facebook makes it easy to do this. You don't need to buy data from Comscore or Nielsen. You can simply collect the segment data you need directly from Facebook.
Here's how to do this, using the Facebook Advertising Platform.
Step 1. At the bottom of every Facebook page you will see a standard set of links. Click on the link labeled Advertisers.
Step 2. Click the big green Get Started button to start creating advertisements.
Step 3. Pick something to advertise. Anything will do, since we're not actually going to create an advertisement. We're just going to mine the demographic data. So put the name of a random web site or blog into the web page field and proceed to the next step.
Step 4. This is where we get to the gold. Simply enter the demographic characteristics you are looking for, and Facebook will tell you how many people match those characteristics. For example, maybe you'd like to know how many single US men use Facebook. Choose United States for country, Male for sex, and Single for Relationship Status. Presto, Facebook's ad engine tells you that there are 4,074,700 people in that demographic.
Perhaps your interest is in reaching single men attending college in the Boston area. Choose In College for education status. A box will appear allowing you to enter the colleges of your choice. Next visit Wikipedia and enter the query Boston Colleges. Enter the resulting list into the Facebook form. Et voila, there are 20,420 single male members of Facebook attending college in the Boston area.
Segmenting data by country, relationship status, gender, workplace and education can yield very good results. Keywords, unfortunately, are much less valuable. Because users self identify there isn't a consistent taxonomy one can use for mining keywords, which leads to very questionable results. For instance, using the keyword "Heavy Metal", or "Led Zeppelin", or "Metallica" yields fewer than 20 US single males who list these keywords. It's inconceivable that there are fewer than 20 fans out there, even on Facebook.
Getting raw data out of Facebook is dead simple. The big tracking houses, like Comscore and Nielsen want to sell you this data. But with a little legwork, you can easily collect the data you need yourself. Moreover, if you're interested in tracking the evolution of a segment, with a little discipline you could simply run the same query on a monthly basis to see how your segment is evolving.
Happy data mining!
November 26th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Thanks — great tip!
November 29th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
This is awesome, Alec!! Thanks for sharing the step-by-step instructions, your ideas, and your experience so far with Facebook ads. I’m exciting to see where we all are this time next year!! :)
November 30th, 2007 at 3:44 am
This is cool - you can really breakdown the demographics. The problem is, though, that people are not always in the city (or country) their network says they are in. For example, I know of a lot of people in the Zambia network who are at school in the US or working in London. So there are limits. And there is no real insight, beyond knowing market size - for that you have to pay facebook 50c. per answer at least.
November 30th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
There’s also the issue of the historical inaccuracy of estimators of this type. Anyone who’s used Google’s traffic estimator, for example, knows first-hand that the data is always wrong and that only real campaign data can be trusted.
I agree, though, that FB’s targeting options are a great way to ballpark segments.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
[...] Facebook Market Research Secrets — Alec Saunders .LOG Great post that explain a simple way to do data mining with Facebook (tags: facebook marketing research social data_mining) Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 11:51 am
This is one of the most useful posts I’ve seen in a long time. Thank you so much!
December 15th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
[...] Saunders published an interesting post that describes how to do some quick data mining with Facebook. The starting point is to click on the [...]
December 24th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Thanks for this. I’m gonna track some profiles in my country, and see how much that Facebook population is growing.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Thanks - interesting post in the guerilla sense of getting stuff done for less (or free). The keywords issue tracks back to the general issue of incomplete user-based tagging (online or offline). It’s the missing link of the long tail.
January 31st, 2008 at 4:32 pm
[...] This clever chap has figured out how to analyse Facebook’s demographics by using its advertising platform. It yields some fascinating results, such as: [...]
January 31st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
[...] This clever chap has figured out how to analyse Facebook’s demographics by using its advertising platform. It yields some fascinating results, such as: [...]
February 17th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
[...] Facebook Market Research Secrets: Discover the sneaky way to perform market research by using Facebook’s tools. [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
[...] Personally, I don’t use Facebook so wasn’t too bothered about attending the keynote interview with Mark Zuckerberg. I find the whole Facebook concept a waste of time and a self agreed exploitation of privacy in the quest to get the most friends and to broadcast to the faceless Facebook herd. Slightly off topic but people complain about ID cards yet they happily share their most private details on a site which is rumoured to have ties with the CIA and can target and sell advertising based on users very specific data. [...]
April 7th, 2008 at 5:30 am
The question that leaps to mind upon reading this post is: are you violating the Facebook terms of service? I ask because they appear to prohibit data mining of exactly this kind.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Good question Mark. My understanding of the TOS (and I haven’t read them in some time) is that systematic mining and retention of individual users data is a violation, but not this type of use. Besides, why would they provide an end user accessible tool if their intent wasn’t for it to be used?
April 8th, 2008 at 7:43 am
[...] Facebook Market Research Secrets: Discover the sneaky way to perform market research by using Facebook’s tools. [...]
April 28th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
[...] Facebook Market Research Secrets: Discover way to perform market research by using Facebook’s tools. [...]
April 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am
[...] the overall Facebook user demographics for yourself using the methodology described in this post: Facebook Market Research Secrets. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)At Four, Facebook Is Not for Kids Anymore « [...]
May 4th, 2008 at 10:41 am
There will soon be more powerful tools for market research on Facebook and LI, see:
http://www.tomhcanderson.com/2008/05/04/facebook-and-now-linked-enter-the-%e2%80%9cmarket-research%e2%80%9d-game/
May 30th, 2008 at 11:57 am
[...] this data to find profitable markets for people in the college age bracket. The site is called the Saunders Log and is worthy of a [...]