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April 16, 2008

Facebook Adds "Lexicon" to Arsenal: A Potent Buzz Pocket Mining Tool

Search Marketers interested in mining data about users' behavior in Facebook have a new weapon with the arrival of "Lexicon." Lexicon measures the "overall usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls." Enter up to 5 terms consisting of multiple words, letters, and numbers and Lexicon returns relative community chatter levels.

Check out this Lexicon comparison of soccer, baseball, and football:

Buzz Pocket Mining means using available tools to measure interest nodes in social communities. It's the rapidly growing little brother to classic keyword research.

Previously the best method for harvesting demographic data from Facebook was their Social PPC Ajax ad creation tool, which offers serious insight to those sizing up users for conversational marketing and social PPC.

Google's "Open Social" API will likely facilitate related techniques applied to other major and niche social sites soon. This makes understanding these types of research tools an essential learning curve for SEMs.

Posted by Marty Weintraub on April 16, 2008 11:59 AM