What Facebook’s Revamped Lexicon Tool Means for Social Media Marketers

Facebook rolled out a sneak peek of the mouth-watering new version of Lexicon this week. Although the demo is currently limited to a handful of pre-selected terms (”swine flu,” “basketball,” “Biden”), the level of marketing insight is unprecedented among existing social media tools. This tool confirms Facebook’s commitment to make the network highly effective for evidence-based marketers.

On a high level, Lexicon provides insight about what users are discussing on Wall posts. Experienced search marketers can think of Lexicon as Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool rolled into an interface that allows you keen insight into demographic and geographic trends. For example, we can input “Swine Flu” and see activity levels for that exact term over time, plus activity levels for synonyms of that term. Furthermore, we can look at usage by geography and demographic category.

An additional feature called “Sentiment” attempts to measure whether terms are used in a positive or negative context. It does this by gauging the use of terms such as “love” or “hate” in context with the keyword. For example, the phrase “I like Joe Biden” would be identified as a positive sentiment for the term “Biden.”

This sneak peek has huge implications for the social media marketing community. We can’t wait for the full release.

Note to Facebook: can we please have a simple conversion tracking tool for Facebook PPC ads now?