The Recession Hits Home On Facebook

March 24th, 2009 by Nick Gonzalez

One of the great things about social media is that, like search, it provides a zeitgeist. Sometimes the sentiments it captures can be surprisingly clear. Take for instance, this Facebook Lexicon search for “laid off”, which started to tip upwards in September of last year. Now instances of the phrase are about 6 times the average before September.

You can see a similar pattern from Google Trends.

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Ryan Merket 10 months ago 1 point
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Nice research. Hopefully we'll see this trend down over the next year.

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nickgonzalez 10 months ago 1 point
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Thanks for stopping by. Seems like it's a trailing indicator. Google trends captured the uptick a lot earlier. Granted, there are probably even better ways of tracking the pulse by looking at chat and user to user messages, but that crosses the privacy boundary.

Does Ping.FM have anything to add?

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