If you’re willing to pony up the advertising cash to Facebook, they’ll give you the red carpet treatment and access to Grapevine, their extremely exclusive service that provides unparalleled user data. (If you’re trying to advertise organically, expect your posts to get buried.)

You didn’t hear it through the Grapevine, but someone with lots of money did

According to a report from AdWeek, Facebook allows certain “high rollers” to access exclusive user data collected by the social media giant. If you’ve ever advertised through Facebook, you know that the information collected by the platform is incredible. Not only can you filter users by demographics, like age and relationship status, you can direct advertising depending on things like how people shop on the Internet, whether they play console games and what type of products they buy. However, this just scratches the surface of the data that Facebook has access to, and will share with you, if you’re willing to spend. According to AdWeek’s source:

“The advertisers spending in the millions on campaigns or a half-million dollars for one ad, that’s who has access.”

Those who are willing to fork over six digit figures for advertising can benefit from knowing what other products their fans like and how people talk about certain products. Knowing which other brands or products people like is huge because it enables advertisers to determine who to align with. If people who drink Coke also love comic books, tie ins to movies and TV shows can be developed accordingly. Regarding accessing data about how people discuss products, using phrases that consumers commonly use when talking about products or addressing particular concerns in ads can make a huge difference in how effective marketing is.

Consumer opinion tracking is in development as well

It appears that Grapevine is intended to or already is being used to track consumer attitudes and feelings. Twitter also data mines tweets to determine public sentiment, using Gnip, but those tweets are by and large available publicly. Facebook’s members are far more likely to protect their accounts, meaning that the data Facebook has is far more exclusive.

While Facebook is being more open about what it’s doing with the user data it collects, and it can basically do what it wants with the information it aggregates, Grapevine is still a pretty big kick in the teeth to the majority of advertisers who don’t have nearly unlimited advertising budgets. Say what you will about Google and AdWords, at least you have a chance of succeeding organically through SEO.