What Are Facebook Users Talking About? Advertisers Can Now Find Out.

If you’re an advertiser, it’s likely someone on Facebook is talking about your product. But what are they saying? And who, specifically, is doing all the talking? Those are answers Facebook is now offering to marketers. The company announced that advertisers can mine “topic data” from Facebook posts -- basically scrape those posts for keywords and phrases -- in hopes of understanding what people are saying about a particular product.

That means if Coke wants to find out what people are saying about Pepsi, it can get that info as one anonymous batch of data. Coke can then see the group’s general demographic info like gender, age, and location to determine which specific subgroups are interested in the search term. Advertisers can also see associated words, that is, words that appear regularly alongside the target word. In this example, associated words might be “thirsty” or “challenge.” For now, Facebook won’t make any money off this topic data. The benefit to the social network is that advertisers will know more about the Facebook audience. And for Facebook, the theory is that companies will be encouraged to use the info to run more ads -- on Facebook, so that’s where the money is ultimately supposed to come in.