Ever wondered who is saying what and how often on Facebook? No, well neither have I really, but Facebook has launched a new service which now shows you anyway.

Lexicon is described as a tool to follow ‘language trends across Facebook’. It looks at the usage of words and phrases on profiles, groups and event walls.  

For example, you can enter “blog, PR” to compare the usage of these two words on its walls. Like I have done on the right here for an example.

Users can enter up to five terms with each being a word or two-word phrase.

How do you interpret its results?

It shows the number of users that posted that term per day on a profile, event or group wall. It doesn’t count repeated terms by a user on one particular day. You can even zoom in and out to analyse the data more closely if you want too.

I know what you’re thinking – is there a privacy issue here? Well apparently not as everything is kept anonymous and it doesn’t consider private data, such as messages, Chat (I will cover that at another time), invitations, or searches.

Marketer’s should give it a quick whirl as it could prove pretty useful for a quick reference to something but apart from that I think it’s pretty basic.

Now if I post this on my Facebook profilewill it show on Lexicon – hmm who knows?

Cross posted on: Wolfstar

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.