Facebook Graph Search is potentially really powerful for content marketers looking to gain some insight about their fans or their competitors’ fans and for people trying to find key influencers such as journalists and bloggers prominent in a certain field.

Graph Search hasn’t rolled out for everyone in the UK yet. You can find out more about how it works and get yourself on the waiting list here. The rollout is complete for US English speakers.

I was a little cynical at first, but then I was looking at it from the perspective of a user rather than the uses I could have for it in content marketing. As a user, do I need to be able to perform queries like “Which of my friends like Radiohead?” I’m still not sure. Potentially there’s more use for queries like “Which of my friends has visited [restaurant]?” Then I could seek recommendations. But I’m not blown away as a user.
From the perspective of what data is available for content marketers though, I think the potential is huge. Here are things you can find out about in a single query without the requirement of admin access on any pages:

• What other pages are liked by fans of your page (and this can be divided into page types such as interest, region, music, TV show, etc)?
• What other pages are liked by fans of your competitors’ page?
• Which offline places do your fans or your competitors’ fans shop?
• Which bars do fans of you or your competitors like?
• Find out common interests of a certain demographic subset (e.g. other interests of men over 30 who live in Manchester and like football)

• For outreach: Find journalists who “like” certain brands or have certain interests and then filter them by the city they live in or other brands they like

Example Queries

Here are some of the queries I use regularly. But there are thousands of potential queries.