facebook lexicon

"Facebook Lexicon counts occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time."

If it's not already clear to most online marketing geeks that facebook is on the fast road to becoming the social equivalent of the almighty search giant Google, it should be now.

Facebook lexicon is, without a doubt, the fast moving social network's answer to the Google Trends application. I have alread had a bit of fun with the new app comparing some of my favourite things.

For example, a comparison between the popularity of my favorite baseball team (The Yankees) against their arch rival (The Red Sox) shows and unfortunate 'victory spike' to the latter around October last year. No surprises here really, as The Red Sox made the world series and eventually won in October 2007.

Interestingly, the same comparison using Google trends suggests a consistently higher level of search demand for the yankees. The spike for the redsox world series victory in October 2008 is definitely there, but no where near as prevalent as the facebook lexicon spike. Google also mashes up key events from their news channel which can help users identify the drivers behind major dips and spikes.

When one considers Google's core business model (selling adwords), one can see that the Google Trends application serves as an excellent support application for advertisers. Research plays a big part in setting up successful adwords campaigns and Google trends aids in this research.

Facebook are going through a defining period as a business. They need to monetize the huge online social community that they have created. This needs to happen much in the same way that it did for Google when they launched adwords in order to monetize the enormous volume of searchers that they created with their superior search engine.

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg is taking the smart online entrepreneurs route by not trying to re-invent the wheel. He identified a gap in the global market (social networking) and he is now leveraging the lessons learned by the likes of Google to help in successfully monetizing facebook.

Lexicon serves as a great example of this in my opinion. It's a great application to support those who want to use the facebook social ads offering in the same way that Google Trends helps adwords advertisers.

Zuckerberg continues to impress me.....

Comments

[Tim]

Thanks for the tip on the winner of 2008 World Series. I have always wanted a psychic friend.