Socialbakers Adds Facebook Listening To Its Repertoire

Socialbakers, which prides itself on deep-dive social analytics, has announced it is now offering Facebook Page listening.

Last year, it similarly launched keyword searching for Twitter, and it expects to add Instagram in the near future, along with searches of news, blogs and forums.

“We don’t want to be a listening solution provider,” VP of new products Moses Velasco told me. He pointed out that the company doesn’t offer such listening features as sentiment analysis and that the new keyword searching is provided for free to existing analytics customers.

But, he added, keyword searching helps its clients, especially because they’ve been shut off from keyword searching of Facebook public user posts via the API.

“It’s not a substitute,” cofounder and head of product Jiri Voves said, but it does provide some indication of what’s being said about your products or your competitors’.

In its post announcing the new Facebook Pages search capability, the company noted:

“Facebook removed the ability to find individual user mentions of keywords due to privacy concerns back in April 2015, meaning that so many marketers who think they’re paying for social media listening are actually just spending money to monitor a few Twitter hashtags.

“Page mentions [by businesses or organizations] are just as important for brands — if not more so. Our recent study showed that a user’s News Feed is at least a quarter Page posts — meaning posts by Pages will likely be seen by a lot more people than a user mention.”

For Socialbakers, its competitive angle for keyword searching is the fact that it has millions of Facebook Pages in its database — client pages, as well as competitor and other Facebook pages that might be of interest to its clients. A typical use case, per the blog:

“Say a digital manager for Nike wanted to keep track of what was being said of their brand and how their hashtags were being used. They could add their keywords in seconds for both platforms [Facebook Pages and Twitter], pick which language and country they were interested in [and go.]”

Although it has this considerable dataset — which the company said is the largest of its kind — Socialbakers did not previously offer keyword search queries.

Its service is focused on analyses of content — what was posted, what kind of user responses were received, detections of promoted posts, how social media lines up with key performance indicators, the most influential followers and so on.

Facebook Pages, as opposed to user profile pages, are exclusively for use by organizations, brands, celebrities or businesses.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.