Apr 16, 2008 2
Harvard vs. Yale vs. Princeton: Facebook Fight
About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and you can search for trends and comparisons over time using this new tool. Very cool, right?
Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.
My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook’s demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.
The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.
In general, the same observations as before apply… just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.
Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).


I'm currently a junior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale. I just got back from studying abroad at Peking University this past Fall 2009 in Beijing, China!
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