Facebook Heats Up in Chile

The omnipresent social meedium facebook continues to assert its' importance to the future of PR 2.0 with blistering growth from Aug-Sept. Reported by Matt Dickamn on his blog Techno//Marketer, Facebook experienced major growth in many foreign markets, with Chile leading the pack, gaining more than 1,000,000 new users throughout the month.

This type of continued growth coupled with the increasingly useful social marketing and trend tracking tools are making facebook more appealing to a wide variety of users.

According to Inside Facebook, a blog about tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for Marketers and Developers

Facebook has just launched a limted test of a new version of Lexicon, the tool for researching what users are saying on each other’s walls on Facebook. The previous version only showed relative volume of terms over time, but the new version has several key enhancements:

• Actual numbers, instead of just relative volume. Now, you can see how many wall posts are actually being written containing the given term.


• Demographic breakdowns, by gender and age


• Geographic breakdowns, by US state, Canadian province, or UK country (no data is available outside of these 3 countries yet). You can also do comparisons between two terms on the same map.


• Sentiment over time. Facebook has not said exactly how it determines this measure. You can also compare sentiment between two terms.


• Associations. You can see terms frequently mentioned alongside a given term.

Tools like these give me hope that the difficulties of quantifying message and campaign exposure that have plagued PR and Marketing practitioners alike, are soon to be a thing of the past.