4th post on Social Media Monitoring: Facebook

Now that Facebook has become the hottest social network, it’s time to pay attention to the conversations that happen there. You can do this with Facebook Lexicon (you need to login to see it) that creates a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. The FB site says that Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications like one-on-one chat.
Reaching Lexicon in itself is a bit of a task. You need to click on the Advertising link in the footer. Here is what all you monitor once you are there:

•Dashboard Shows the number of unique users for the search keyword, the percentage of the Facebook user base that mentioned it, and the total number of posts.
•Demographics Show trends over time, based on users characteristics like age, gender and country.
•Maps display locations within different countries. Currently limited to the US, Great Britain, and Canada.
•Sentiment display the like or dislike for a given topic.
•Associations is like related topics.
•Pulse is an interesting feature that shows the Interests like Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books etc of people discussing the topic/keyword searched. Example: You can have a count of people who like listening to 'Madonna' among those talking about 'Swine flu', for a date range.

Its not a very good tool and certainly stands no where near the effort that products like Twitter(my previous post) have put in to facilitate SMM.

That's a good idea...a series on What Facebook can do more? Coming up next...on a browser near you :-)