Facebook Lexicon

I caught this interesting story on TechMeme this morning about Facebook’s new Lexicon tool. It works in a similar way to Google Trends in that it tracks what the Facebook community is talking about in the form of a graph:

The graph above is tracking talk about the film Juno. Unfortunately, it seems to be down at the moment so I haven’t had a chance to properly test it.

So why’s it useful then? Well, Facebook has around 70 million users so you’re getting realtime information on an extremely rich dataset. As the demographic of Facebook strongly skews towards the 18-24 year olds you’ll end up with a rich source of information for what’s hot and what’s not for the youth market. This is definitely very useful for finding new products which haven’t come onto your radar for affiliate marketing purposes. In the similar way to Google Trends, Facebook Lexicon allows keyword comparisons so this could also kick start some useful Pay Per Click (PPC) keyword research for comparing different keywords and which are more popular. I’m hoping to get a better play with it once the masses have finished hammering their servers. Oh and Facebook assures us that it’s not linked to any personal data so don’t worry about talking about things you shouldn’t on your Facebook profile!