I have always used LinkedIn to get an idea of how widely a brand is used. Knowing this helps me justify a domain name acquisition cost by understanding how many potential buyers there might be for a particular domain name. I have been using Facebook lately to do the same thing, and it has some advantages.
In order to look at home many businesses there are with a specific brand name, I will look at Facebook “pages” results. I have found more businesses and companies use “pages” rather than standard pages. The results would be similar to LinkedIn companies.
Facebook pages, though, are less “professional” in a sense. It’s not always official businesses like LinkedIn companies tend to be. What this means is smaller mom and pop businesses – perhaps those operating less formally – are more likely to have a Facebook page than a LinkedIn page. After all, these businesses can sell things more readily on Facebook than LinkedIn.
One nice advantage of Facebook over LinkedIn is that I can see when the company last posted something. I think Facebook and LinkedIn are both littered with listings of defunct businesses. Clicking through to a Facebook page, I can see the last time a post was shared and how often that page previously posted. A business that posted once a week for 2 years that stopped posting in 2015 is probably no longer operating.
LinkedIn is still a great tool to learn about companies, but I have been using Facebook for this quite a bit.
I’ve done some of the same with Facebook and trying to determine if a business is still “alive” or not before buying a related domain. 👍