I recently wrote a paper on digital evaluation methods for my Advertising degree at Manchester Metropolitan University.

One of my particular favourites was the new version of Facebook Lexicon. This improved tool will not only monitor buzz of a particular search term on Facebook walls, but will allow you to determine the gender, age and country of the poster, as well as the sentiment of the conversation.

It doesn’t stop there; Facebook Lexicon helps to build up a detailed picture of the people having the conversations. It presents a chart of the most frequently mentioned associated words within the post for which the search term appeared. Under the ‘pulse’ function it lists the most common interests of the individuals from their Facebook profile.

The only down fall with the new version is that there is currently only restricted topic search terms but it has been promised that these will be expanded in the future. However this is a fantastic tool for monitoring a social media campaign on Facebook and it shows why online PR is proving so popular with its clear and measurable accountability.