With over 1.1 billion active users and almost 700 million mobile users, Facebook has grown to be the most influential social media platform on the web. The company grew 26% from 2011 to 2012 and users spend a total of 700 billion minutes on Facebook each month. Now, not only does Facebook know what users post about, they know where they live, their orientation, political views and what they ate for breakfast that day (figuratively speaking).
Twitter also possesses a large collection of data telling them what their users tweet about, but Facebook has a strategic advantage: They know who you are.
I know, it's like a creepy scary movie where a random, late-night caller says "it's because I'm standing at your front door"; but this is real life, and a real tech company really know a lot about you. Don't worry though, they're not studying just you, and they're not standing outside your house. They're collecting information about you, combining it with information on billions of other users and creating an Amazon River-esque stream of big data that could provide tremendous purposes for future innovation and development.
We can trace back Facebook's data obsession back to Lexicon, built by an early Facebook scientist, Roddy Lindsay. The program was launched in 2008 with little ruckus and let users of the API see the relative frequencies of how many times keywords appeared in walls posts. It didn't give them exact numbers, but it could tell them the popularity of terms used. In other words, it wasn't quite Big Brother yet, but it was slowly working it's way up the hill.
In February of 2010, Lexicon was removed from Facebook after a year and a half of service. Most would love to think it's because the analytics tool was smearing the line between privacy and monitoring, but that wasn't the case. They just wanted a better analytics tool, which makes perfect sense. There are so many web pages that take advantage of analytics tools for social media sites; these tools help them engage in content, figure out what their target markets and brand identities are, and find more potential customers. And that's just the cusp of API potential.
Now, more than two years later, Facebook released it's Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API in early September (2013), giving access to some of the top news companies, including BuzzFeed, CNN, NBC's Today Show, BSkyB, and an analytics firm Mass Relevance.
These new APIs let selected news outlets view search and see your public posts now. Facebook also keeps track of mentions that have specific keywords in them and collects the data. One Facebook representative confirmed to TechCrunch that "we see the potential for these tools to be really useful down the line for brands and agencies. That will definitely come in the coming weeks."
The Public Feed API allows these companies to search for a word and get a list of public posts that contain it. The Keyword Insights API is a much more advanced version of Lexicon, allowing companies to see how many people mention a word in both public and private posts (instead of just showing the popularity of the word). The tool also gives a demographic breakdown of users and keywords, giving data in areas like age, gender and location.
John Constine of TechCrunch relayed two very important points about Facebook privacy and these new analytics tools being introduced:
You don't have to be a part of the sample of data being pulled. If you set your posts to "private", the API will not tap into it for Public Feed data.
However, the Keyword Insights API does, but the data is totally anonymized and no names are tied to keywords. Additionally, no one sees the actual content of your posts in the Keyword Insights data.
So what do these two new super-analytics tools do for Facebook and for news and media outlets?
First, they let the news and media display live feeds in their broadcasts or coverage. For example, CNN's New Day can now incorporate what Facebook users are saying while the show airs and include a ticker that displays the most relevant posts in real-time. This creates the same type of interactive experience that Twitter has been doing with news and media outlets.
These new analytics tools could serve as a massive opportunity for news and media outlets. The number of Facebook interactions during large media events has continued to climb over that past couple years, and just this year, 245 million interactions took place concerning the Super Bowl, 125 million for the NBA Finals, 66.5 million for the Oscars and 28 million for the Wimbledon.
The new analytics tools could also create a new space for Facebook: A real advertising space, with real data to fuel it.
In 2010, Facebook made drastic changes to the design and appearance of the site, bringing all of your personal information to the top of the page and adding prompts that push users towards fully completing their profile. Now, profiles display a "completion meter" that shows just how far away from completing it you are.
To do this, Facebook had to collect demographics from every user in order to manage the prompts correctly. This surge of innovation left Facebook sitting on top of a pile of data. The newly accumulated data (i.e. information on your relationship status, education, history, etc.) was the power behind the latest News Feed sorting algorithm and ad engine. It did things like show you more stories of people that were closer to you or had more in common with you. It also gave advertisers critical information on events happening in your life, like when you graduated or got married, so they could put ads in the sidebar that showed you wedding photographers or party planners. It was a beautiful move, and a perfect demonstration of how a company can combine pockets of data to create a movement of innovation.
The accumulation of this data has surmounted to these new, more advanced analytics tools that now gives Facebook leverage over Twitter. Although Twitter has been helping TV broadcasters fill out their shows for years with polls and tweets, Twitter doesn't provide the demographics Facebook is capable of. This is because you don't have to provide any personal information when signing up for a Twitter account.
Facebook can show how many people in different areas are posting about a topic, the age and gender of those people, and even their political views (if this information is publicly accessible). And the fact that Facebook's user base is five times the size of Twitter's gives them a Goliath-sized leg up.
Facebook confirmed to Constine that they will also be releasing the data to brands and ad agencies in an experimental process to see which data-sets will be most useful to them. This could create a massive opportunity for companies to use this data to target specific segments. It also let's Facebook become a new sort of giant; one that provides ad agencies with all the tools necessary to utilize the social network site to their maximum advantage.
Let's say, for instance, a large population of 18-25 year olds in the Greater Chicago Area are tweeting about a new product released by Apple. Using the new APIs, Apple could very easily discover this at the click of a button, and respond by creating a promotional deal in the city that gives students at DePaul or Northwestern a discounted rate with purchase of the product from any Apple store in the city, or even surge more online ads that target younger Apple users in the Midwest.
This relates back to how big data can be used in so many different ways, and how it's importance and relevance is growing faster than we think it is. Facebook has responded to this cultural and technological shift by creating better analytics tools. As a result, they have began to expand their channels and services offered. What used to simply be a site for social networking is now quickly transforming into one of the big data hot shots on the web. This massive database will prove to provide ad agencies, marketers, media outlets and many others a plethora of ways to target and analyze their customers.