Last week was “Likes Matter” week.

I spent a lot of time focusing on how much likes matter and how important they are now, more than ever before.  I even created The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Page Likes, For Real Estate Agents.

Here’s the deal. Beneficial likes make you relevant and that is one of the foundational “pillars” in Facebook’s Graph Search Algorithm. This is one of the reasons why I teach that real estate agents should be running a continuous “like targeting” ad, never ceasing.

I’m sure you know by now how stink’n hard it has been to find anything via search on Facebook. Almost impossible, unless you know exact spellings. And forget any semblance of finding correlations of things: friends who graduated the same year you did from the same college you did who now live in your current town.

Facebook finally has a solution they released late in 2013. What is it? It’s called Graph Search.

"Graph search is Facebook’s social solution for connected search. It is a search algorithm that delivers results based on connecting the dots in the mountains of data Facebook as collected from its billion users. Results are served up based on relevancy and relationship rather than keywords. ~ Marketo"

OK. That’s probably as clear as mud.

In a traditional online search you would first probably search for your college and then do whatever research you could to find alumni.

On Facebook, it’s much easier.

Step 1: People I know who went to YOUR COLLEGE

Step 2: People I know who went to YOUR COLLEGE and graduated in YEAR

Step 3: People I know who went to YOUR COLLEGE and graduated in YEAR and live in YOUR TOWN

If you want to expand it to people you may not be connected to, you’d simply change your search to:

Friends of people I know who went to YOUR COLLEGE and graduated in YEAR and live in YOUR TOWN

or

People who went to YOUR COLLEGE and graduated in YEAR and live in YOUR TOWN

And there is your list.

You can use Graph Search for anything, from targeting your audience for your business page, to researching your page likes, to deepen your knowledge of your page fans learning about their hobbies and interests.

You can dig deep into the interests of your competitors fans, improve the quality of your Facebook contests and so much more.

How?

Well first, you have to know where Facebook Graph Search is.  This is a hard one.  I mean, it’s kind of hidden . . .

Yes, I’m being ornery ;)

Second, you need to know what to type to achieve your search goals.

Here is an example…

Targeting your niche audience by their likes and interests.

Step 1: Favorite pages of people who live in YOUR TOWN

What comes up? Any other community pages? Any pages that have over 5-7K likes? Anything that interests you? Anything that fits your target niche?

In my search image below, the top favorite page is the North Idaho Fair & Rodeo. It’s a community page and it has over 20K likes.

What can I do with this?

Do I specialize in farm & ranch properties? Do I prefer working with equestrians? Survivalists? Arts & Crafts lovers?

I can take that community page title right over to Power Editor and target people who live in Coeur d’Alene, that are a certain age (at least over 18 if you want them to be legal to sign a contract) and are interested in the North Idaho Fair & Rodeo.

So now I have a targeted potential audience of 4,000 people that closely fit my niche. You can go even deeper. Just search out more interests. The deeper you target, the much better return your advertising will give you.

You should be using Graph Search on both levels – to connect with your SOI that you aren’t connected to AND to target your advertising to funnel people you’ve never met onto your page and ultimately into your database.

Here’s another example…

Digging deeper into your Page’s fans.

Step 1: People who like YOUR PAGE

Step 2: And now get to digging deeper with the options on the right hand side of your screen

or

And now get to digging deeper by looking at your fans in the details on each one.

And yet another example…

Research your competitions fans

Step 1: People who like YOUR COMPETITION’S PAGE

Step 2: Research their fans. Interests. Similarities. Differences.

Essentially, the possibilities are endless. Learn about your target niche and then target them based on their interests!