A Marketer’s Look at the New Facebook Lexicon
If you haven’t used it before, Lexicon is a tool provided by Facebook to measure the frequency of keywords appearing on the walls of profiles, groups, and events over time. You can plot statistics for multiple words or phrases against each other in the same graph. The thing to know about Lexicon is that it is currently the only way to peek into the conversations happening on Facebook — any other tool you might be already be using is locked out of Facebook due to the “members only” nature of the community. As such, marketers should be taking it a little more seriously. But first, it has to take itself a little more seriously — fortunately, the latest version of the tool is a big step in the right direction.
In its current incarnation, the tool is extremely limited in that it only conveys the relative frequency of search terms — the Y-axis is even not labeled. This example demonstrates a predictable spike in conversations about “Santa” leading up to the holidays, with very little mention over the course of the rest of the year:
Clearly, the current tool is a little more than a toy, providing some amusement but very little practical application. Facebook recently unveiled a far more feature-rich version of Lexicon, sporting graphs and visualizations of keyword associations and sentiment in addition to demographic data. At present, the New Lexicon is limited to a set of predefined queries, but already shows significant progress towards becoming a more serious conversation measurement and analytics tool.
A fairly predictable cycle of the frequency of the word "football" week to week.
The basic frequency graph finally gets a quantified Y-axis, as well as basic age and gender breakdowns. Hovering over individual data points reveals the associated date and value. These upgrades address the biggest fundamental shortcomings in the original Lexicon.
Associations: more than just colorful bubbles
The new Associations tool provides a fascinating look at the prevalence of words and phrases associated with the search term. It can be a tricky picture to interpret at first, but looking at a couple of outliers helps to clear up the picture. For instance, in this example one finds that mention of “our homecoming” in close proximity to “football” is made predominantly by a younger, mostly female user; in the opposite corner, it’s not surprising that “fantasy” (as in “fantasy football”) skews to a slightly older, almost entirely male population. Finally, the size of each bubble represents the volume of its mention in wall posts.
At first this may seem like just another “toy” feature from Lexicon, but the implications for marketers should not be glossed over so quickly. This tool has the potential to tell you, at a glance, what’s being said about your brand and by whom. It’s not Radian6, but I might go so far as to call it Brand Tags on steroids.
Facebook users: disenfranchised with politics in general?
Next up is the Sentiment tool, which claims to track not just frequency, but positive and negative sentiment associated with given keywords. I chose a political example only because it had more interesting data than football vs baseball. This tool, despite its intrigue, still gets labeled as a toy until Facebook provides greater detail on the methodology used to assess sentiment. It’s easy to see how a basic sentiment crawler could look at a sentence like “I don’t think the new Lexicon is worthless, in fact it has some real potential” and only pick up “new Lexicon is worthless,” thus counting the comment as negative sentiment. I’m not saying this tool might not be generally accurate, but I wouldn’t set your social media strategy by it.
Finally, there’s the Maps tool. This is also just another toy, but it’s interesting to play around with for those who are curious. Like all of these tools, it will be come much more interesting once users can specify their own query terms.
I skipped over the new Pulse tool, because frankly it’s nothing more than a clunky Facebook version of Twitter trend terms, and not of much use when you can consider the same data over time using the Frequency graph.
All in all, several of the tools provided by the New Facebook Lexicon have real potential for marketers, but just as many of them never make it out of the realm of novelty entertainment. It will be interesting to see if and how marketers apply these tools to their Facebook strategy once full custom queries become available.
Marketers: are you considering using Facebook Lexicon in the future?
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Very interesting indeed. Our technology provides similar insights but on data from open social networks, forums, and blogs. It is very interesting that Facebook is continue to rev this functionality considering they are closed.
Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies