Facebook intends to capitalize on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool.
The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeting certain Facebook users because of the information they have posted on their pages is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.
Last week 24-year-old Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg showed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, how the social networking site could be used to poll specific groups of users.
He asked users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes.
He also polled more than 100,000 US users of the Web site, asking them whether they thought US President Barack Obama’s fiscal stimulus package would be enough to resurrect the economy. Two out of five said it was not enough.
Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.
Speaking to well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble at the event, Zuckerberg said this year would be Facebook’s “intense” year as it tries to justify some of the mammoth valuations that have been placed upon it by making some serious revenues through advertising. He was even seen sporting a tie, which the Harvard drop-out had so far eschewed.
Zuckerberg said the company had been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online.
Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors’ products.
Facebook’s advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their display advertisements when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook — which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.
Last year, Facebook launched its Engagement Ads tool, which allows advertisers to publish a poll on people’s home pages. They are then able to see how their friends and other users have voted.
The polls, which can include actions such as watching and rating a movie trailer, are being tested by companies including AT&T and CareerBuilder.com.
The US recruitment Web site used its trial Facebook polls on Sunday to ask people what they thought of the ad that was played during the coverage of the 43rd Super Bowl. However, the first widespread use of polls is expected in the spring.
Facebook also has a tool called Facebook Lexicon, which is a bit like Google Trends, allowing users to track what topics are being discussed by people on Facebook.
While Google Trends uses the search terms that are entered into its site, Facebook Lexicon looks at one of the most visible parts of a user’s profile page — their wall, where people and their friends exchange public messages. It provides a searchable database of trends over time, showing how the incidence of particular words or phrases has increased or decreased in wall posts.
Facebook Lexicon shows that the company already has a significant database of user data that it could exploit and the tools are in place to allow firms to use its information for market research.
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