Facebook Lexicon: Social media trends analysis tool for marketers

Facebook has recently made a new tool available for marketers (and other people who care). Lexicon is a app that, much like Google's Zeitgeist, tracks the usage and popularity of keyword terms.

Lexicon is a tool to follow language trends across Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter "love, hate" (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

Facebook is making it really easy for marketers to examine keyword-based trends, and possibly use this data to shape campaigns. For something like a movie, marketers can examine keywords from a viral campaign to determine reach and frequency among certain social strata. Combine this with targeted social ads, and the 60+ Million users on Facebook just got a little easier to understand.

So how does Facebook deal with privacy conerns, after it's much debated 'beacon' fiasco from last fall?

Lexicon data is completely anonymous and simply looks at how popular words are on Facebook’s public and semi-public forums. All personally identifiable information is removed before the Wall posts are aggregated. Lexicon does not look at any private data, such as data from messages, Chat, invitations, or searches.

This is just one of a few changes that Facebook has quietly implemented in the last few weeks, including a new live chat bar, and some simplification of language throughout the site.