
Facebookers like things, share things with their friends, divide their friends into groups, comment on things, play games and even sell and buy things via the Marketplace. All these activities leave a trace within the Facebook system. These traces are analysed by Facebook to give its advertisers an amazing opportunity to target specific groups of people. You liked a website, posted a video with the music of a band that always put you in a good mood, commented on some brand’s page and Facebook infers: you like that site, your like that music, and your attitude towards that brand’s page can be extracted using sentiment analysis.
Moreover, your friends see what you did and react giving Facebook even more data, from which it can conclude who of your friends share similar tastes. This is a very powerful information for marketers, who can target easier and more effectively convert leads into new customers. This is also one of the biggest advantages of Facebook. No one else has such information, and Facebook doesn’t allow developers to gather this data, unless users explicitly agree to it. But after the yesterdays Steve Job’s keynote, the question is: can Apple get even more valuable consumer information and move Facebook from the position of the most desired advertising spot?
Continue reading “Is Apple becoming better source of consumer data than Facebook?” →