Did you know you can search for trends on Facebook? This is a very smart tool which was actually shown to me while back by my old work colleges at Shopzilla. I remember spotting some trends mainly across social activity based keywords (eg party, drinks etc). These were obviously used mainly before weekends and bank holidays, I used the tool for a while then bookmarked it pretty deep in my bookmarks folder along with my 1000’s of other sites, after a while I forgot all about. Recently when I was doing a combination of bookmark cleaning and work on some advanced keyword research I re discovered Lexicon.

Lexicon can be found at http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/. You’ll need to log into your Facebook account before being able to use the tool. Lexicon is a Facebook trends search tool that, when used correctly, can be a very powerful SEO tool indeed, you can view the social keyword trending of real conversations across Facebook. The tool scans over what people are writing about on their Facebook walls and displays it in graph format, much like Google Trends does for searches performed in Google.

It’s very interesting to search for buzz trends and breakout keywords. Think you’ve spotted a niche breakout in the market? Why not check it out on Lexicon to see if people are talking about it, if so, optimize for it! Currently you can compare up to five different words or two-word phrases. Either way this is another great tool for your SEO work. The only downside I’d say to watch out for is the time adjustment slider along the x axis of the graph, sometimes it’s a bit slow to respond in Firefox and can lock up, so rather than just zooming straight in to a specific week slowly adjust the bars.

Whether this SEO tool is for the Coolest Geek on the Net! (primarily me ), for all you SEO’s out there, or just folks who wanna see when most people on Facebook are getting lucky this is a very nice fun utility that can be used to supplement to your arsenal of keyword research tools.

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