Facebook measures how happy we are!

Facebook is even more omniscient than we all thought. It can now chart the world's collective highs and lows – well, nearly!

As we all know, Facebook allows us to update our friends on the minutiae of our day-to-day lives via status updates. With millions of active users (200 million to be precise) that's a lot of data.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently expressed an interest in using this staggering amount of data from the updates to generate a kind of 'sentiment engine'. The Facebook data team analysed the rich information from these musings, along what they dubbed a 'Gross National Happiness' metric.

'Measuring how well-off, satisfied or happy with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. The graph below represents how the nation is doing from day to day, and measures 'happiness' by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when updating their status: when people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!'

In other words, these updates are tiny windows into how people are doing, and Facebook users will soon be able to update their status even more frequently as the application is set to launch on games console Xbox 360 this month.


So does this, and other behavioural targeting (such as IPA’s TouchPoints Survey), mean we will never be served an irrelevant ad in the future? Moreover, will we soon be seeing ads targeted to our moods?

Spotify, like Facebook, already employs demographic targeting for its display and audio ads, and has now announced it will be introducing the new mood-targeting within the year.

If you're a brand that needs to reach people in a relaxed mindset – perhaps they're listening to Ibiza chill-out or Mozart – you can now serve the right brand to them at the right time, explains UK Sales Director Jon Mitchell.

However with this increased information becoming available, brands now need to think even more carefully about the optimum way to deliver their messages in a relevant way to the consumer, in order to avoid alienating their audience.

Claire Turner