30/03/2013
Since Facebook announced Graph Search in January, the social media giant has introduced several new functions across its platform, like greater ad targeting tools and a revamped News Feed. All of these updates put user experience front and center, and it’s the marketer’s job to understand how to engage with social users in genuine ways. As internet marketing evolves, brands see content creation as the ideal practice for interacting with new and existing customers online.
At SES NY, Brafton’s marketing team spoke with industry folk about their perceptions of content marketing, and many professionals still view web content as a secondary task compared to other web marketing techniques. Yet every emerging channel today depends on custom content, and that’s especially clear with Facebook’s Graph Search feature.
One of the first flaws people noticed about the social site’s search function was its lack of keyword data. Brands wanted to know the phrases that drove traffic to their Pages, as the data could inform optimization practices on the network and across the web. However, G-Squared Interactive’s Glenn Gabe uncovered that Facebook has begun sharing keyword data within referral strings.
Gabe writes that the keyword insight goes through a query string [q={keyword}] at the end of the referring URL. Unfortunately, website analytics tools from both Google and Bing don’t view Facebook as a search engine, so webmasters must dive into the code to find this data manually. For those interested in acquiring this data, Gabe outlines a step-by-step guide here.
