Nielsen, Facebook forge alliance: Social networking as consumer attitude tracker

Nielsen and Facebook said Tuesday that they have forged a strategic alliance to use the social networking site as a research tool to gauge consumer attitudes and buying intentions.

Under the multi-year alliance the two will collaborate on products for marketers designed to get a read on consumer attitudes (statement). The first effort is something called Nielsen BrandLift, a tool to gauge advertising effectiveness on Facebook. The Nielsen effort comes after Facebook shelved its Beacon tracking effort.

The plan is to roll out BrandLift to a few marketers and then to all Facebook advertisers in coming months. BrandLift users opt-in polls on the Facebook homepage to read consumer attitudes.

What are the benefits?

• Nielsen gets a fun data set to analyze.
• Facebook can use Nielsen's data crunching expertise to improve ad effectiveness.
• And you get to part of that social media/consumer attitude data set.

Let's face it you're not getting much out of the deal. But Nielsen must be salivating over analyzing Facebook's 300 million users. In fact, this deal may illustrate the future business for Facebook. Advertising will certainly play a part in Facebook's future, but the data and insights may become much more important. Ditto for Twitter.