Facebook Finally Lets Its Firehose Be Tapped For Marketing Insights Thanks To DataSift

Twitter’s firehose of tweets has long been offered as a goldmine for businesses trying to understand how to improve or market their products, and now Facebook will allow privacy-safe peeks at its treasure trove, too. Today Facebook launched a new insights product called “Topic Data” in the U.S. and U.K. with the help of brand analytics leader DataSift.

Facebook explains that “Topic data shows marketers what audiences are saying on Facebook about events, brands, subjects and activities.”

For example, “A business selling a hair de-frizzing product can see demographics on the people talking about humidity’s effects on their hair.”

On days when everyone’s posting status updates about how frizzy their hair is, a brand could step up its ad spend knowing it’s the perfect time to reach potential customers. Sentiment, location, volume of mentions and words often mentioned alongside a brand can be pulled, too.

Out Of Datasift

Because much of Facebook’s data is private, unlike Twitter, offering Topic Data in a privacy-safe way is a top concern and might explain why Facebook waited so long to offer this functionality that brands have been begging for. To ensure personal info isn’t divulged, Topic Data is aggregated and anonymized, so brands can’t know or piece together exactly who said what. I asked Facebook and it confirmed that certain queries that might pull up personally identifiable data like home addresses will be banned. At least 100 different users have to match a query for it to be allowed.

Still, the idea that their private status messages to friends will fuel better ad targeting may irk some Facebook users. There’s no opt-out, and the only way to keep data totally private is to either set posts to be visible to “only me” or not post at all.

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