Facebook’s recent announcement that it will do away with Graph Search has major implications that reach far beyond the native search functionality on the world’s most popular social network.

In the social listening world, Facebook is the elephant in the room. We all know there is an enormous volume of conversation taking place on the platform, but due to privacy settings, only an estimated 1-3% of mentions of the companies, brands and products that we conduct research and measurement for are available to be captured by social listening tools.

Well, that 1-3% is soon about to drop to a cold and lonely zero. Why? Because Graph Search is the source that many social listening tools access in order to pull in even just that 1-3% of conversation. When Graph Search is completely phased out on April 30, those social listening tools will no longer have access to any posts on Facebook (except on their owned channels).

What does this mean for those of us who do this for a living?

It means we need to start informing our clients/teams that we won’t be pulling any Facebook data into our social listening reports (other than their owned pages that have been connected to their social listening accounts), reported volume of mentions will be lower, goals should be reevaluated, workarounds should be sought.

One workaround is DataSift’s new PYLON offering. Not only will PYLON fix the loss of the 1-3% of public Facebook conversation that most social listening tools access, but it actually provides access to non-public posts. Finally, a firehose-type product for Facebook.

Before you get up in arms that your private Facebook posts are being made public, it’s important to note that DataSift is anonymizing all non-public posts. From my position as both a privacy-wary consumer and a data-hungry analyst, this appears to be the perfect happy medium.

The question for me is if my clients are already paying for a social listening tool, should I advise them to pay for PYLON, as well?

For most of my clients, PYLON is too much work. It’s not a user-friendly tool, but rather a raw API. You need technical skills and budgets to organize and analyze.

The more likely solution is that your social listening vendor will partner with DataSift to pull the PYLON data into their system and provide the infinitely more robust data sets to improve their offering. If your vendor isn’t already looking into this, I suggest you give them a nudge.

How are you addressing this decrease in data access ahead of the April 30 cut off? Let me know in the comments section.