Can Facebook Lexicon Give Twitter Search Run For their Money?
About a year back, Facebook launched its new trending service like Google Trends or Technorati called Lexicon. Now things have moved on from that and its all new lexicon went live which gives some very interesting and nifty results to look at.
By Definition: 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.
In the meantime, I was following Jesse Stay’s blog post on the same and it struck me hard thinking that wow, isn’t twitter has the same service called twitter search. So I went on comparing the two and believe me I see great potential in that new service.
Some of the reasons are as follows:
1. The new Lexicon has some great features like demographics, associations, sentiment (awesomeness), pulse (+1 on that) and maps too for each keywords or tag you would be interested. Though it’s still restricted to few keywords right now but wait for sometime when the Facebook folks understand the real potential to use it as a search tool, then things will surely start rolling. This sort of breakup of keywords into such parameters is what Twitter search is lacking and Marketers want at the end of the day.
2. The features can really help marketers to delve deep into the keywords and understand the much needed information of what kind of users are interested in those keywords (which can be of brands/service/new product info etc). This can prove beneficial for Marketers to present a useful case for their marketing spend (no pun intended)
3. And as Jesse pointed out, if Facebook starts to provide APIs around this search data, along with the publicly available user status updates and profile data, they will be a very serious force to reckon with, that I think, regardless of the mass funding Twitter has, will be extremely tough to compete with. So true! I also think if something of that order takes place, then surely Facebook can give Google a tough fight apparently.
4. Lastly, I think Facebook Lexicon can be more useful because of its 190+ million users which increases the search audience size, that means more tags/keywords and more refined results, whereas twitter is just 8 million (roughly).
These are my initial thoughts on the same. More thoughts to come and I’ll be keeping a tab on it and see how it evolves from Facebook’s side. So any thoughts on it?
Search Interactive Marketing Blog
March 23rd, 2009 at
Facebook lexicon didn't impress me much. They show trends. But don't reveal any numbers. Without revealing numbers, they will never become the primary research tool for marketers and trend researchers. Because the graphs show rising or falling trends. But not the impact.
On Facebook having 190 million users vs Twitter having 8 million users – if you're into trend tracking – that shouldn't matter a lot. Because you can use statistical analysis and extrapolate the twitter data for the overall population. Remember that election poll results in USA which are 90+% accurate just measure the thoughts of 2000-5000 people – not the entire population. So accuracy can be gotten from smaller batches.
Anyways – my eyes are on this tool:… Read More
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/...
I hope they come out with an API. Its a much much better search tool for us marketers. Because it shows the buying intent.
March 23rd, 2009 at
Won't doubt the extrapolation nature of data – that's what all statistical researcher do. But thanks for the Microsoft adCenter Labs link. Would browse through to know more about it.
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Sampad
March 23rd, 2009 at
When they have an API for Lexicon, then it will get interesting to me. I also don't trust their numbers so far. I have a hard time believing 80% of the posters talking about "techno" are female. Is this techno as in the music or a word-stemming snafu and the system is picking up 'technology"?
March 23rd, 2009 at
Yeah there are some preliminary snags as you've pointed out. But I was looking this from a long term strategy of Facebook's. This service has a good potential since I believe FB has the calibre to drive conversations in close SocNet with the new redesigned outlook.
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Sampad
March 26th, 2009 at
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