Using Facebook Lexicon for Demographic-Targeted Keyword Research
Facebook has released a cute new application called Lexicon which calculates the bigram (two-word) frequency of potential keywords based on Facebook wall posts since January and pushes out a trend graph based on the data they have. This could be a valuable tool for clients who are interested in marketing to the Facebook demographic.
It’s also got a handful of other interesting ramifications. For instance, you really get a feel for how seasonal things can be by entering queries such as “vacation”, “swimsuit”, “bikini”, where we see growing trends to the summer—likewise for “heat wave”. News events cause interesting word correlations. For instance, note the spike in frequency for “suicide” and the spike for “Heath Ledger” coincide—apparently wall posts were a big rumor mill during Heath Ledger’s death.
This tool definitely has promising ramifications for the future of paid advertisement on Facebook. Advertisers can use the wall post data to gauge the interest of Facebook users in specific keywords or topics and use the trend data to make important decisions on their campaign. A downward trend in wall posts may herald less likelihood of the appearance of the paid advertisement. Also, the reduction in buzz may indicate less leads derived from targeting this keyword in the future. This is a good example of the utility of domain-specific data to further inform keyword-related decisions both within the domain and without—Facebook users use search engines, too, and we can extrapolate these trends out to show the interest of a specific demographic and how it impacts search volume for any given keyword.
