seo

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

A lot of my life’s work has been focused on increasing the visibility of women and other minorities in male-dominated professional fields. I’m not here to give you an intersectional Feminism 101 lesson or explain to you that institutional sexism is indeed alive and systemically present in online marketing. Instead, in the spirit of the Moz blog, I want to give you tips and tricks to make our corner of the world more welcoming to women. Several of these tips can also easily be adjusted and applied to other groups of marginalized people. Some can really just be applied broadly to life. According to our 2013 industry survey, 28.3% of online marketers are women, and at MozCon 2014, 31% of the audience self-identified as female (up 11% from 2013). We’ve been here for a while.

If this post gets your bristles up and you’re ready to yell at me in the comments, I ask you to  check out the many resources at the bottom to help build the basics to better understanding the “whys” and realizing “yes, this is a thing.”

In order to be better marketers and better people, we need to open ourselves up to the experiences of others, particularly to the voices of people whose backgrounds are different than ours. But because of how our cultural biases work, we often must actively and consciously work at creating more welcoming environments. It sucks to think we’re any less than awesome, and even when we consider ourselves non-prejudiced, our behavior can still support systems of sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and more.

Let’s dive in and shake up the industry!

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Never assume someone’s gender, especially in online communications. If you’re in doubt, either ask or use a gender-neutral pronoun.

If we had a nickel for every time the all-female-identified community team was emailed or Facebook messaged as “Dear Sirs” because we work for a SaaS technology company, we’d be rolling in nickels Scrooge McDuck-style.

Nothing can instill imposter syndrome or make someone personally upset like being misgendered. Human culture is so sensitive to displays of gender and identification of gender that a misplaced “sir” or “ma’am” can be incredibly insulting. If the person being misgendered is genderqueer or transgendered, they may be even more sensitive due to the vulnerability of displaying to the world who they are as opposed to who society thinks they should be.

If you’re ever communicating with someone whose gender you’re unsure of, it’s better to ask than to use an errant pronoun. So rip out that “Dear Sir” and replace it instead with “To Whom It May Concern,” or better yet, something more specifically personal. Dump the he, she, or s/he and just use an epicene “they.” If emailing my team, try “Hi, awesome community team…” You’ll probably see better success with your request by not starting out on the wrong foot.

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Girls vs. women: Refer to groups of adults with words that imply adulthood, especially in professional settings.

Perhaps one of my top offenses as a professional woman: being labeled as a girl or seeing another woman or group of women labeled as such. The worst is when it’s the “men and the girls” or “the guys and the girls.” Stop infantilizing women!

Again, this elicits imposter syndrome and also makes women appear inferior, as children have more to learn than adults. So please stop referring to us as girls and conjuring up images of pink, pigtails, and Barbie dolls. We’re professionals and grown-ups.

The tweet above was sent out by a company I’ve worked with and expected more from. The webinar was with two women I’ve also worked with and are some of the sharpest, smartest minds out there in our industry. They were talking about online marketing, and it was completely inappropriate for the company hosting the webinar to refer to them as “girls.” (Neither of these women worked or have worked for said company in the past.)

And before anyone mentions the phenomena of the term “geek girls,” let me take a moment to address it. I know there are many organizations that are working hard to bring the achievements of women in all forms of geekdom, including tech, and inviting more women to join that call themselves “geek girls” or have some variation in their name. This is fine. This is their group’s choice for self-identification, branding, and rolls-off-the-tongue alliteration. However, you would never say “All the girls going to Geek Girl dinners…” They’re adult women.

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It’s not appropriate to have value judgments about the way a person looks in a professional setting.

Unfortunately, because women are too often seen as objects instead of people, those objects are given value judgements on their appearances. Women shouldn’t be treated like you’re picking out the best sofa for your living room. It doesn’t matter how cute you may think a woman in the industry is, she likely doesn’t want to hear it or doesn’t care.

Constantly judging women based on our appearances damages self-esteem. It entrenches stereotypes about beauty having been a woman’s most important asset since she was a little girl. It also puts women who don’t fit up to traditional Western beauty standards—maybe they’re plus-sized, women of color, genderqueer, etc.—at a disadvantage to gaining the professional attention of anyone. Think twice before commenting to a woman how beautiful she is. Or, conversely, how unattractive. (Same goes for men, by the way.)

At the end of the day, what matters most is brainpower, so let’s actually act like it.

When I think of highly successful women, who are constantly judged on their attractiveness, Hillary Clinton’s a powerful example. Do we pay the same attention to current US Secretary of State John Kerry’s pantsuits?

For more things not to say to women in a professional setting, I highly suggest reading Ruth Burr’s Things You Think Aren’t Sexist, But Really Are.

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Follow more women on social media.

Particularly on social media that’s public and open like Twitter. With networks like Facebook, many women I know actually don’t “friend” people they have met face-to-face or actually consider friends for safety reasons. Sadly, on networks such as Twitter and even the female-dominated Pinterest, men are followed at higher rates than women.

In a perfect world, content on social networks would be shared based entirely on merit. We’d only share the funniest tweet, the cutest cat photo, the most insightful post on Google Analytics, or the best hack we learned today. The best people and brands would have millions of followers. We’d have no internal biases.

But the truth is that as the world gets smaller, in that we’re more connected, and as technology serves “smarter” content, we’re only going to see people more like ourselves. Eli Pariser called this the “filter bubble.” And while he particularly noted the consequences of this in politics and being attuned to world events, this also applies to the experiences of people who are not like you demographically.

For example, over the Memorial Day weekend this past May, Google released a Penguin update. My Twitter stream was full of Penguin talk by male-identified SEOs. What were the women talking about that weekend? #yesallwomen. I couldn’t help but wonder if male SEOs, who followed other SEOs primarily, which is a male-dominated industry, even saw the hashtag actively in their streams? Did they know how big the #yesallwomen hashtag was until they saw news stories? I hope for the best, but realistically think about the bubble.

“The internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” — Eli Pariser

So how do we see the world we need to see? How do we work to essentially outsmart these built-in features? On Twitter, it’s actually pretty easy to find and follow people who aren’t like you.

Twitter’s own analytics and our own Followerwonk will break down the gender of who follows you and whom you follow. Here are some breakdowns of my own Twitter account and those of my fellow Twitter-loving Mozzers, including the genders of the people we follow:

Here’s Twitter’s own analytics on the gender breakdown of who follows me (which I think speaks volumes about our industry as “SEO” is the top interest of people following me):

It’s worth noting that Twitter has categorized every account as either male or female. This is problematic because some accounts are companies, not people, and it discounts people who do not identify with either gender or are somewhere in the middle. Twitter’s using a mix of self-reported demographics (what Followerwonk picked up), name categorization of gender, and natural language processing to look for gender signifiers. My recommendation for Twitter: join Facebook in giving people more gender options and toss those companies out.

Recently, our own Rand Fishkin took a close examination of his followers and those he followed back, in a concerted effort to follow more women on Twitter. Rand was pretty shocked to learn how many more male followers he had than female, and he was perhaps more shocked about my followers, given that my Twitter bio identifies me as a feminist and I tweet more about social justice than online marketing.

In addition to following more women, look at the gender balance of people you retweet and whose voices you’re helping amplify. Twee-Q analyzes your last 100 tweets and shows the gender balance who you’ve been retweeting. Entrepreneur Anil Dash talked about how he spent a year only retweeting women. Even if you don’t follow Dash’s footsteps, it’s pretty eye opening to see just who you’re retweeting.

I swear I did not stage this equal RTing result. Usually, I skew toward more women than men.

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Create inclusive community guidelines or a code of conduct for your site, blog, forums, reviews, social media, events, etc.

As a community manager, I’m a little obsessed with keeping the virtual living room free of hatred, especially on sites directly owned by a brand. I love, for example, that the comments on the Moz Blog are actually valuable to read, unlike almost every other site out there.

It’s hard to backpedal and bring order to your community; we all watched YouTube integrate G+ and Huffington Post hire an army of comment moderators. But most of us aren’t managing a community with millions of incoming comments and forum posts. Community guidelines or a code of conduct give you more room to be explicit about expectations for behavior on your properties.

For example, Moz works in the SEO space. So while it’s not very TAGFEE to put a spammy link in a comment, it saves argument time that it’s actually outlined in our community etiquette. While not directly tied to stopping discrimination, you can easily see how parallels in explicitly outlining what kinds of speech your brand won’t tolerate. “Be excellent to each other” can just bring on too many arguments from the person you’re moderating.

The allowance of hate-fueled user-generated content sends a signal loud and clear to women, minorities, and allies just what your brand is about, and this feeling is only amplified when we all meet face-to-face.

This year at MozCon, we implemented a Code of Conduct. For those that don’t know, in the events space, there’s been an increasing awareness of harassment at conferences. One way organizers are combating it and making attendees safer is by explicitly laying out a policy against this behavior and how event organizers will respond to said bad behavior. Again, this should be solvable simply by saying “be TAGFEE”—or whatever other motto your brand chooses—but unfortunately, this is not the case.

Some of you have speculated about what happened to make the MozCon committee decide we needed a code of conduct. We created the code to be proactive. This is just one more way to improve our conference and be welcoming to marketers of all stripes.

MozCon 2014 attendees having breakfast before the show.

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Make your brand voice and design guides inclusive instead of exclusive.

Many people make employment choices, not to mention purchase decisions, based on “culture.” Culture is a nebulous idea, and while it’s formed by the combination of how people in your company act and brand perception, you can start out on the right foot. Culture’s not a top-down dictate, but the signals come from both directions, and a strong brand voice and design guide can help company communication on what’s implicitly acceptable and what’s not.

Most of us work for brands that are gender-neutral. We don’t cater to an exclusively female-identified or male-identified audience. However, we tend to adopt cultural tones that identify our band as a specific gender, and furthermore our industry as exclusive, instead of inclusive.

You’re probably thinking about how Moz’s own Roger Mozbot uses the male pronoun. While Roger’s name and his use of the male pronoun will likely never change, those of us who work on Roger as a mascot strive to make him as gender neutral as possible. He doesn’t use specific masculine language, and despite many requests from our community, he doesn’t have a love interest. Roger’s first love is SEO, after all. He’s beloved by all our community members, not just the male-identified ones.

Not all companies think about these nuances. For example, why is banking portrayed as a masculine industry? Why does it need to support stereotypes that women are bad with money, math, and the financial market? Doesn’t every adult need a bank account, retirement savings, and access to their money? Does the marketing-bias only reflect the hiring bias?

Who’s getting interviewed here? Who looks most like a banker? Who should apply here?

Brands who do live in a sphere where they can say 80%+ of their audience comes from a particular gender should also pay attention. If none of your competitors are going after that other ~20% of audience share, you have a market opportunity. At the very least, small tweaks to your voice—like using that epicene “they”—or adding a pop color not commonly associated with your industry’s dominant gender can make you the friendly, go-to brand for those who feel like outsiders in your niche.

ExOfficio shows actual customers fishing, not just models in the clothing.

Outdoor and travel clothing brand ExOfficio is known for their fishing clothing. Fishing is considered a male market, but they do a great job making the same fishing clothing for women too. Sure, they might add in different styling and colors and offer some variations geared toward women’s fashion, but their imagery and their core offering of fishing clothing doesn’t shout out that these are women fishing.

Let’s also look at a cautionary tale of what can happen when brands try to be more inclusive toward women: the pinkification of the market.

While yes, this is marketed toward girls, not women, this fishing set nicely illustrates pinkification. Turning it pink and labeling it with Barbie somehow makes it “for girls.” But what really makes me upset is the language. Behold the “Purse” of fishing, which contains the exact same actual equipment as the Spider-Man one marketed toward boys.

While this may seem a bit consumer-focused, the products you put out the world and the marketing behind them reflect directly if someone can see themselves working at your brand. When I first heard Apple announce the iPad, my gut reaction was to ask if there was a single woman working on the Apple marketing/product team. Because to me, this MAD TV sketch about the then-newly released iPad (possibly NSFW) said all the things I was thinking.

Conversely, if your employees know this matters, when something bothers them, they’ll likely bring it up. Recently at Moz, our team worked hard on new customer personas. At the end of the day, four were chosen as Moz’s current target market and the rest put on hold as future markets. While the personas were gender-balanced overall, it so happened that three of the four current customer personas were male. Because of Moz’s culture, multiple people approached the persona team questioning this. The team then pivoted to change the names to be gender neutral selections and edit the accompanying art and descriptive text to reflect this.

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Publishing an image of your company, what’s the gender balance?

While we’re thinking about how your brand looks to potential employees, what images are out there of your company? Are they only men? Is there only one type of woman?

Unfortunately, this main image on our recruiting page presents Moz as looking for a certain type of employee: a young, fit, white professional, preferably with light-colored hair. This doesn’t reflect the actual makeup of Moz, especially at 140+ people. But what if this was the only image? What would a potential employee or recruit who didn’t fit that image think?

This can be particularly challenging for small businesses. You also don’t want your employees to feel tokenized for their gender identity or minority status. Perhaps it’s time to think more about what a photo means to applicants. BarkBox had 30 employees in early 2014, and here’s their simple, yet more welcoming recruiting image:

It only takes a little extra effort to go a long way.

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Include women in interviews, quotes, and other articles and events touting industry experts.

There’s simply no excuse for an article or an event full of industry experts and to not have the final lineup include a single woman. While there’s no “magical number” to achieve diversity, it’s simply bad practice when a lineup features only men. If you seriously can’t think of a single woman expert in your field, you’re doing something wrong.

There’s a strong correlation between seeing yourself demographically and dreaming that you could do that job too. We all need inspiration and heroes to look up to and aspire to be like. And great marketers, we come from all kinds of backgrounds and make this industry a better place because of that.

If you’re a white man asked to speak as an industry expert, it’s time to ask who else is being featured or speaking. Turn down engagements that only have male voices. Ask more of authors and conference runners. If you’re the author or event curator, reach out to someone in the industry who’s opinion you respect for ideas of experts you’re not thinking of. I’ll gladly send you my binders full of women marketing experts.

A sample of the speakers at SMX East 2014

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When you witness sexist behavior, say something.

I saved this tip for last because it is one of the most powerful. Simply not keeping quiet and speaking up can change the world. We all have to work together.

“People will not listen unless you are an old, white man, so I’m an old white man, and I will use that to help people who need it.” — Sir Patrick Stewart

Unfortunately when women call people out on sexist behavior, it’s not as powerful as men saying the same thing. Same goes for a black person calling a white person out on racist behavior, etc. And when a woman calls a man out, she’s making a “political” statement and suffers real consequences in her life. Despite laws in many countries against these things, complaints of any kind can lead to economic consequences of losing jobs or clients and to safety concerns about harassment both online and offline.

A recent study actually showed that whistle-blowing or any kind of confrontation wasn’t even necessary for economic consequences. Women and people of color who promoted other women and people of color and/or valued diversity in the workplace received lower performance reviews than white men who did the same.

Male-identified friends, if you see someone or a company doing these things, please help and speak up. Please stand up for those who are doing this hard work and please be aware of your own biases.

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More resources…

Basic resources:
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
The Male Privilege Checklist by Barry Deutsch
30+ Examples of Heterosexual Privilege in the US by Sam Killermann
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi
The Problem When Sexism Just Sounds So Darn Friendly… by Melanie Tannenbaum
Derailing For Dummies
Aamer Rahman from Fear of a Brown Planet on “Reverse Racism”
8 Things White People Really Need to Understand About Race by James Utt
An open letter to privileged people who play devil’s advocate by Juliana Britto
Yes, All Men: Every Man Needs to Understand Internalized Misogyny and Male Violence by Tom Hawking
Roll up, roll up, to see a man talking about feminism. What could possibly go wrong? by Robert Webb

SEO, tech, and startup specific resources:
Not all men. Not all industries. But nearly always men in my industry by Martin Belam
Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet by Amanda Hess
Women as Entertainment in the SEO Industry by Jane Copland
The Problem with ‘Brogrammers’: Why is Silicon Valley so stubbornly white and male? by Rebecca Burns
Meritocracy [in Tech] is Almost as Real as this Unicorn by Tara Hunt
Death by a thousand cuts: the reality of being a woman in tech by Meg Kierstead
In Tech Marketing Jobs, Women’s Successes Are Rarely Recognized by Laura Sydell
Eve wasn’t invited: Integrating women into the Apple community by Brianna Wu
Gender Bias in Online Marketing: Data Shows Women Are Undervalued by 21% by Larry Kim

Further resources:
On being an ally and being called out on your privilege by Andrew David Thaler
TEDxWomen Talk from Anita Sarkeesian about Online Harassment & Cyber Mobs
Dissent Unheard Of, real and economic impact of speaking out by Ashe Dryden
Dos and Don’ts To Combat Online Sexism by Leigh Alexander
In Which We Teach You How To Be A Woman In Any Boys’ Club by Molly Lambert
The Confidence Gap by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
“Raving Amazons”: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media by I’Nasah Crockett
Visibility Conundrums of Being Queer by Erica McGillivray

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Posted by Iamoldskool

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

I love Screaming Frog. It is without doubt the best SEO tool I use on a daily basis (no offense, Moz). The sheer amount of data you can get about your website, or someone else’s website, is incredible. You can find broken links, you can check for your Google Analytics (or any other) code on all pages through the custom search, and you can even go so far as to follow all the redirects and find out the redirect paths in a website.

In this quick guide, I’m going to show how Screaming Frog data can be used to help perform a content audit.

The data in Screaming Frog is incredible, but one thing it can’t do (yet…give it time) is tell you how popular your pages are. For that, you need an analytics package. We’re going to be working with Google Analytics on this one, as it’s probably the most well known (and well used) of the analytics services out there, and we’re going to combine the two data streams into one to give you a full overview of your content and just how popular it is. As this data is from a website I work with (rather than my own), I’m going to hide the URLs in the screenshots for obvious reasons.

Why would you want to do this?

Combining Google Analytics data with your Screaming Frog data has a myriad of advantages. You can get an overall picture of your site and identify any issues that are occurring on popular pages. You can see which pages within your site have no page views at all, or the ones that have very few page views. Maybe there are issues on these pages that become immediately apparent when you combine the two datasets.

Getting your data

Step 1: Screaming Frog

Spider the website you’re working with in Screaming Frog. Just type the URL in the box and click go, and off it goes getting all the data from your website.

Filter the list to just include HTML and hit export:

Step 2: Google Analytics

Head over to Google Analytics and go to the “All Pages” tab:

Set a decent data range of a couple of months so you get some decent data (especially if it’s a low traffic site), and set “show rows” at the bottom to 5,000 so you get as much data as possible.

“Hang on a minute, Jim,” you’re saying….I have a lot more than 5,000 in my list. How do I get the rest? Well, that’s a simple hack. Go to the URL at the top and look at the end of it for the 5000. It will look something like this:

Now just up that figure to cover all of your page views, and you’ll have a huge long list. I have 9,347 on my list, so I’m going to up it to 10,000.

Great. Now export that data to an Excel file:

Now you have the two sets of data in Microsoft Excel format. Next, we’re going to combine these two data sources into one

First step. Open them up and put them both into a single excel file on different worksheets, then label them so you know which is which:

Now, make a third empty worksheet for your compiled data. Here’s a view of the worksheets you should have at this point:

To make this work, we’ll need the URL (page name column) to be the same on both sheets. The Screaming Frog data contains the domain, where as the GA data doesn’t, so use find and replace on the Screaming Frog data to remove the domain up to the first trailing slash. The two data sources should now have URLs that match.

With me so far? Great. Now it’s time to link the data sets together and get that lovely combined data in your third worksheet.

Linking the data

OK. Go to your Screaming Frog worksheet and select all the data and on the formula tab, click define name – give it an easily identifiable name (I would name it the same as your worksheet).

Then do the same with the GA data: Select it > Formula Tab > Define name > Name it the same as the worksheet.

Got both of them defined? Groovy, time to put this data together.

Save your file.

Go to your third worksheet, named “compiled data.”

Then on the data tab, select “From Other Sources” then From Microsoft Query.

It will then ask you to choose your data source, choose excel file from the options and click OK. Then, find your saved Excel file and select it; you’ll be given the option to include your two named data sources.

Select both, and add them to columns in your query. Click next, you’ll then be presented with what looks like an error message (but isn’t really).

Click OK.

Then drag “Page” on the GA Data onto “Address” on the Screaming Frog Data like this

And, you’ll notice all the data from the two data sources below will reorganise itself.

Then, click file > “Return data to Microsoft Excel.”

On the next one, just click ok… and that’s it. You should now have a single worksheet with the combined data from Screaming Frog and Google Analytics to play with and do what you want.

Hope my little tutorial made sense and people find it of use. I’d love to hear what other people use this tutorial to accomplish in the comments 🙂

Thanks all!

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Posted by Paddy_Moogan In my last post on Moz a few weeks ago, I talked about the idea of paying to promote your content using social channels. Today I actually want to go a step backwards in the process and talk about content creation.  1. … Continue reading →

Posted by gfiorelli1

I’m not so sure it’s correct to say—as is so common lately—that today’s SEO is a new one, especially with regard to on-site SEO.

Many of the things that are necessary today were also necessary in the past: a well-designed information architecture, a great navigation structure, good internal linking, etc.

We should talk instead of a new emphasis we must give to some factors as old as SEO itself.

Today I’ll talk about one of these factors—Topical Hubs—that, although it has been important in the past, is even more so today with Hummingbird and the increasing weight Google gives to semantics and thematic consistency of the sites.

[Disclaimer about my accent in the video: I swear, my English is not so bad, even if it really sounds Italian; just the idea that I was in Seattle shooting a WBF stressed every cell in my body].

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Posted by SimonPenson

Social search has long been heralded as the “next big thing.” The opportunity to create the search engine for people is too enticing; the prize being held above all others in the race to build the next Google.

Facebook is widely recognised as the only company other than the search giant itself capable of creating such a product, and it’s one of the key reasons behind its enormous  price-to-earnings ratio. Few are investing on the strength of the current format; instead they know that the data it has at its fingertips could be world-changing in terms of information retrieval and advertising.

And that project began in earnest, publicly at least, with the launch of Graph Search in 2013.

At the time the product lacked any significant features and after a short fanfare, marketers’ focus shifted elsewhere. The engineers, however, had very clear instructions to iterate, fast, and the results of that work are now starting to float to the surface.

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What is graph search?

Graph Search is Facebook’s way of mapping all the data we give the platform together in a really useful way. It is by far the best example of “Social Search” – the premise of creating a search engine based not on websites but on entities – people, places and things.

The company has been quietly iterating it since last year. There’s still a long way to go but the foundations are already there for what promises to be the only true rival to Google in the world of information organization and retrieval and only days ago did they start testing new functionality that allows some users to search through content as well as people, interests and things.

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Search operators

So what has changed that makes Facebook’s search engine worth talking about again for digital marketers?

The answer is the introduction of a large number of much more sophisticated search operators, or ways of searching, layered over the top of a greater connected data set.

To help understand what we mean, we have created this free  Facebook Graph Search Cheat Sheet, brimming with many of the useful connotations you may want to use to improve your understanding of your customers, or those of your competitors.

This post is about using it specifically to find, learn about, and work with influencers in your space and build out a much more detailed picture of your existing and prospective audiences.

Using Graph Search

Before you can even begin extracting useful information from the platform, however, you need to check to see if you have access to the full search facility. To do that there is a very simple little hack that involves changing your language settings.

Claiming Graph Search

If you are reading this from the US then chances are you will already have Graph Search by default. That is not the case for all. If you fall outside of this and still have the painfully poor old search box you must head into settings to change this.

To do it search for your settings in the top nav.

Next, go to the General account settings and change your language to English (US) and hey, presto: You should now have enabled Graph Search.

Marketing uses

There will undoubtedly be scores more ways for marketers to use Graph Search as the months roll on and functionality improves, but as we examine the options today we can divide them into five key areas:

1. Audience insight
2. Influencer discovery
3. Influencer research
4. GSO – Graph Search optimization
5. Advertising

1. Audience insight

Number one on the list has to be the ability it gives you to join the dots in your audience research work. The endless hours I and other marketers spent sitting behind one way screens as part of ethnography research group work in past decades made true insight very labour-intensive and expensive. It was also only partially effective, as by the time data from these methods was processed it was often weeks, or even months, old.

Not for one moment am I saying, however, that those methods have no value, as getting in front of your audience to see how they really use or interact with your product(s) can be extremely useful. But the data pot is small.

Where you can really start to trust your findings is when the data you are handling is “big,” aggregating the beliefs of tens of thousands of current or potential customers.

So, how does Graph Search help? Let’s look at that in a little more detail.

Initial research

We have already discussed how the functionality of Facebook’s search engine has come on in leaps and bounds and here we can start putting that to use.

We’ve created a free cheat sheet to help you navigate the scores of search operators ( download it here).

Let’s look at a couple of examples in real time now so you can see how it works.

For this run-through we’ve chosen a brand in the UK entertainment space, but we have kept the brand anonymous. The process of running through that data, however, should give you a very good understanding of how to work through this, step-by-step, for your own brand.

To begin with, we can start with something relatively simple: A look at other pages liked by those that like the brand. This helps create a better understanding of the other interests of the audience:

To achieve this, search for: “Pages liked by people who like INSERT BRAND”.

As yet, however, we are not getting into anything especially insightful. To really dive into the exciting data we must find a way of segmenting these random brand and page affinities with broader interest sets.

To do this we can again lean on Graph Search to provide us with that detail.

To achieve this search for: “favorite interests of people who like INSERT BRAND”.

As you can see, there are already some revealing interests coming to the fore, and we’ll look at those in greater detail a little later.

As with any research, however, results can be skewed by small data sets, and so to bulk out those numbers it is possible to combine your brand with others in the same space.

To achieve this search for: “favorite interests of people who like INSERT BRAND and INSERT COMPETITOR”.

Once you have a list of relevant and useful results, the options are almost endless, and it is at this point that you can decide to add extra depth to the areas that matter most.

For instance, for our example brand it is important to understand what drinks and food the audience likes, as they run a large number of “brick-and-mortar” outlets.

To achieve this search for: ‘favorite ‘DRINK/FOOD’ of people who like ‘INSERT BRAND’.

And given that discussions may be ongoing around brand ambassadors it may be useful to extract some information about favourite celebrities, musicians or entertainers.

To achieve this search for: ‘favorite ‘DRINK/FOOD’ of people who like ‘INSERT BRAND’.

The results here can be truly eye opening – and there is still more you can dig into, which we’ll look at a little later.

Quantitative data

The challenge with the above is that while it can give you significant qualitative insight the problem is gauging just how much of your audience shares that same interest.

It’s all well and good creating content to suit individuals, but you may be wide of the mark if you don’t have a fuller view of shared interests.

Thankfully, however, there is a way to get just that.

I’ve written previously here about extracting social data for use in informing strategy and we can use that same principle here to add the richness we need to give us the confidence necessary to make real decisions.

The science bit

Grabbing that data is easier than you think and while it’s not perfect the result is worth the effort. Here’s how it works.

There are no fancy tools either I’m afraid, just a little bit of simple math, and to help make that process as hassle free as possible we’ve already built this simple calculator, which should make the process as pain-free as possible.

Step one

Start by jumping onto Facebook’s Ad Centre and click ‘create ad’. You’ll then be presented with this screen. Click on any of these, but we’ll use the Page Likes option here.

Once in the console scroll down until you get to the Audience section.

Start by selecting the geography you wish to look at. You can choose to focus on a global audience by default, but for this study we have chosen the UK. On the right hand side you’ll then be able to see how many people fit the selection. For instance, here we can see that there are 36,000,000 people in the UK on Facebook.

The next step is to add the audience interest. This can be anything from an interest to a brand, so let’s start with our example entertainment brand (BRAND A). The right-hand column now tells us that there are 96,000 people in the UK that ‘Like’ them.

The next step is to start to understand a little more about those interests we saw earlier using Graph Search.

Remember the pole dancing ‘interest’. Who couldn’t? The question is, just how many of those who already show an affinity with the brand ‘Like’ this alternative entertainment activity when compared to the average person?

Benchmarking

To do that we simply add pole dancing to our brand audience as you can see below and it gives us the combined audience of 126,000 people.

OK so far? Now comes the math part – and this is where the calculator can come in useful.

Below we can see the formula that sits behind the calculator and this will give us a better understanding of just how much our audience likes pole dancing.

Taking the numbers we have just talked through we can now create a sum that looks a little like this and it tells us that 6.25% of the brand’s audience likes pole dancing.

That feels like a high percentage but, feeling is not good enough. We need to know for certain and to truly understand what that means we need to look at the average person and then compare the two.

To do that we work through the same process by first getting the number for the UK Facebook audience and the pole dancing audience separately.

And we can then use this simple formula to work out what percentage of the average Facebook audience likes pole dancing.

The result here is that just 0.1% of the average audience likes this particular interest. The brand audience just got very interesting, as there is a huge over-indexing of this particular interest. We know, therefore, that content around this subject matter will resonate!

The idea from here is to then rinse and repeat this process for multiple interests so you can chart them against each other like this:

This is where we really start to understand our audience. The pink column represents the example brand’s audience and the blue the average Facebook audience. We can clearly see where the over indexing is.

Those are the interests you want to really concentrate on as part of your content plan, as you know there is a high propensity to engage.

Competition ideas

Graph Search can also be used to refine those content ideas. Let’s say, for instance, that you are running a competition to win restaurant vouchers. Rather than generically doing the same thing for everyone in the UK why not look to see if there is a North/South, or state divide?

Below we have used the same process as previously described but also looked at how location affects affinity with different restaurant brands.

The data above suggests there is a definite North/South divide and the marketer would be better offering McDonalds or Nandos vouchers to those in Manchester and Frankie and Benny chain coupons to those in London for better engagement.

2. Influencer discovery

Another area that Graph Search can really help marketers with is in finding key influencers and evangelists – both of which are critical to today’s marketing plans.

There are several ways you can do this.

To begin with let’s take a look at our example brand once more and start uncovering those people with the most potential reach. We are able to use a couple of more advanced Graph Search operators to see whose attention they may already have.

A great place to start is by looking at the blogosphere in a little more detail, and that starts with this search:

We can immediately see here that there are a number of people that run blogs and already like the brand; a brilliant conversation opener when you reach out to them.

And if you struggle to find bloggers who do follow the brand then why not utilize this search instead to see if they follow, or are friends with, people who work for the brand?

We can see here which other options are available to us in this section of Facebook’s data set if we want to refine our search. It doesn’t end here, either, as there are many more nuances available:

And if larger sites are your ultimate targets then a search for journalists is also possible, as below:

While you can also refine by location if your campaign needs to target a country, region or city:

Should you wish to refine that search further still you can target specific publications. Our search here for The Telegraph newspaper in the UK brings up more than 1,000 people, many of whom are key journalists:

And we can then use the internal search tool to refine further by job title:

By using it to find “writers,” it creates this search, and we have a list of 12 people to then connect with via LinkedIn or via a call to the newspaper’s news desk.

3. Influencer research

The value that Graph Search can bring to your marketing plan doesn’t end there either.

Using it to paint your audience understanding picture and discovering influencers in your network is obviously very powerful in itself but you can also use the platform to add further colour to your influencer pitches.

As journalists are pitched to every hour of the day, warming that conversation with some prior intelligence can make the difference between success and failure.

It’s possible to find out a lot about individuals with this same process and give you a much better understanding of the journalist you want to work with as a result.

Take this search for example. Let’s say we want to find out more about the Assistant Editor at The Telegraph magazine, discovered with this little search:

We can then use many of the searches previously mentioned to build a really good picture of his interests, and what makes him tick.

Knowing that he clearly supports Tottenham Hotspur and that he will be excited about the new Inbetweeners movie coming out gives you a brilliant “in” and conversation warmer.

And we can even see where he likes to spend time. Below you can see one of many searches that use Bing’s map functionality to bring extra location-based insight. It gives us the places the Assistant Editor has visited:

It’s this area of Graph Search that could offer the most promise in the long term, and I would be worried if I ran Tripadvisor or any other review-based site, on this evidence.

While review sites are generally based on the general public view Facebook is able to slice and dice to give you the views of anyone from your friends or family to those with similar interests or ages to you—trusted reviews from people you know and or respect.

4. GSO – Graph Search optimization

If Graph Search is going to become more useful then the likelihood is that people will start using it more and that means one thing; the birth of Graph Search optimization, or GSO.

Being at the top of those lists could drive significant traffic to brand pages and understanding how Facebook orders that will be key.

There is very little information on this area at present but logic suggests that the same signals used to order Facebook’s activity wall would apply to Graph Search.

This may mean that Likes and the new links with extra weight given to Likes from people and pages with the largest audiences. The more authoritative the person or brand behind the connection the greater the impact on Graph Search rankings.

If you then throw page actions into the mix, such as content likes, shares and comments as well as app usage and so on, you soon build up a clear picture of how GSO may work.

Could this mean that the digital PR of the future includes work to incentivize key influencers to Like Facebook Pages, or engage with key content? Only time will tell.

And given the fact that the Menlo Park company is already testing a search facility for content, this area will undoubtedly become more important still.

5. Advertising

The value of the insight also extends to social advertising. Given that CPCs are often higher in important commercial niches, it can really pay to understand where else your audience may be interacting.

If, for instance, those you want to target are also very likely to have an affinity with gardening, then creating ad groups to test your advertising in that niche can often result in a reduction in CPCs.

Not all interest sets will work here and in practice it is a good idea to create six or more campaigns targeting the top shared interests and then run them for a day or so to see how they perform.

Takeaways

Graph Search is here to stay and will increasingly become a major weapon in any marketers’ armory as we all look for ways of making our strategies and campaigns smarter and more effective.

The audience insight it gives and ability to drill down into the minutia is what those investing in Facebook see as its real value, and they’ve clearly only just started opening the treasure chest.

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