Upcoming tools provide PR pros with goldmine of data

Published at Social Disclosure, a PR & Social Media blog.

Facebook’s Lexicon feature is about to get a radical turn around, making the fun-to-play with tool into a serious data cruncher for anyone, especially public relations professionals.

The new Lexicon (which can be tested in Beta here) allows users free access to Facebook’s treasure trove of users and much of their statistical information as well.

In the current version users can search two terms and see the differences of how often those terms appeared in wall posts across the site. The newest rendition, however, splits the data by gender as well as age.

In addition, a new demographics trends page can sort users by country while an associations page suggests related terms and shows the popularity of each on a timeline of colored bubbles.

There’s also a sentiment page, which shows references for how often users write “I love” or “I hate” in addition to the search term, tracking the feelings of the general population over time.

The new pulse page shows other common interests from the profiles of the people who have written about the search term, and finally, the new maps page explores how many users from each state were discussing the term.

So while Facebook has provided a bunch of cool new toys for its fans to play with, the company has also given an invaluable gift to public relations professionals.

Consider typing in the title of your company and finding out what common interests (ranked from greatest to lowest) fans have. If 103 users who talked about “Social Disclosure” happen to like cooking, why not occasionally cater (pardon the pun) to their tastes also?

Or what about sentiment? Release a new product lately, or just make major job cuts? Sentiment delivers a look at your company’s popularity at any given time. These are tools that help public relations professionals to understand and relate to their markets better.

Facebook should consider adding the new set of Lexicon tools to the Pages feature available for corporations on the site. As many PR directors already use corporate identities to relate to fans, being able to tap directly into the interests and feelings of those most loyal is definitely nirvana.