Radian6 and Listening on Facebook
By: Ryan Strynatka
Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the hottest topics of conversation around social media, and an increasingly important part of social media in business.
A couple of years ago, it was an upstart social network for college students. Then it was the everyman’s social network, spreading like wildfire to teenagers and grandparents alike. And today, Facebook has taken hold as a significant and important player not just for individuals, but for companies who are looking to interact and engage with their customers online.
As a social media company, we absolutely understand the importance and significance of Facebook for our customers as well as the social media industry as a whole. So we wanted to talk with you a bit about how Radian6 approaches Facebook, and a few things you should know and keep in mind when including it in your listening and engagement strategy.
What We Cover
Radian6′s coverage of Facebook is built on Facebook’s Graph API. In clear terms, what that means is that Facebook provides us with a data stream of:
• public wall posts or status updates
• wall posts on Facebook Pages (or Fan Pages, as they’re commonly known)
• wall posts on Facebook Community Pages.
Also, a cool new feature: Facebook “likes” (from the Facebook Likes “plugin”) are now included in the “Votes and Likes” metrics on your Radian6 dashboard. Our current support is for the Like Plugin embedded on websites external to Facebook.
So if 20 people Like an on-topic piece of content where you’ve got the plugin installed, we’ll count it in the Votes and Likes metric in your dashboard.
(Note: while you’ll see Facebook posts in your search results, Facebook still requires you to log in to be able to view the public individual profile wall posts on Facebook itself.)
As it stands right now, the Facebook Graph API doesn’t include comments on wall posts. So, for instance, if someone posts a link on your Facebook wall and 10 people comment underneath that, those comments won’t be included in your Radian6 search results (even if they include keywords from your Topic Profile). It’s a current limitation, but we’re actively working on adding this capability.
As Facebook continues to build out their Graph API, we’ll continue to expand and refine the coverage that we can provide via Radian6. We’re going to continue carrying out coverage checks and enhancements on an ongoing basis, and we’ll keep you updated on how that coverage evolves.
Measuring Facebook
It’s important to note that comparing exact metrics of brand mentions on Twitter versus Facebook can be misleading, because conversations in open-access areas of Facebook only represent a snapshot of the potential total brand mentions. If a mention is posted in a closed or private area of Facebook, we won’t be able to include it in your results. As a business, it’s important to keep this distinction in mind, because it will impact the way you can measure and account for Facebook results in your monitoring and measurement activities.
A Note About Privacy
Something that’s very important to make clear: if your individual Facebook profile privacy settings are set to anything other than being viewable by “Everyone”, or if your Group is set to Closed/Secret, neither we nor any other search or monitoring provider will be able to see or find anything posted there.
Facebook is only a partially open network by design, which means that what’s visible to the outside world is dictated by the users themselves, and controllable via profile settings and preferences. For individuals, you can find those settings on your profile under Account > Privacy Settings. For Page administrators, you can adjust who can post to your page Wall your admin section, but wall posts on Pages are, by design, public. Facebook Groups can be made Open (completely public), Closed, or Secret, the last two only being visible to group members (and controllable by the administrator).
If your individual profile is private but you post to the Wall of a Facebook Page or public Group for a company or brand, that post will be publicly visible and available to Radian6 and other monitoring or search tools via the Social Graph API.
In short, Radian6 can and will only ever cover items that are classified as public, or that are posted in Facebook’s public areas.
What’s Next
We know how important it is to you that we stay on top of what’s happening in social media, and how important Facebook is to you. We’re listening, and we’re continuing to build out our coverage capabilities daily so that you never miss a relevant post.
Facebook presents a unique challenge in the social space, but we’re up for it. And we’ll continue to keep you posted as our coverage and capabilities for Facebook grow.
Have any questions about what you can and can’t do with Facebook data, or what you’re able to find via listening? Let us know. We’ll do our best to answer.
Tags: Facebook, Listening, radian6 coverage, Social Media Monitoring
hi i´m a Radian6 customer, when will be updated the tool with this new feature????
Hi @RojoVillegas – this is actually available now. You'll see "Likes and Votes" show up in a few different areas – most notably in the River of News and the "Count By" section of the Topic Analysis widget.
what % of user status updates on FB are public??
Hi Matt – good question, and to be honest with you I do not have a definitive answer. It is difficult to measure because we can only see and access the public posts – and don't get an indication of the total. I did some snooping online and haven't come up with anything yet, but will be in touch when I do. Personally, I feel that it may be a somewhat small percentage (if we're talking about personal wall status updates).
In Australia I've been told it's only 3% who have publicly open Facebook profiles. And we are apparently on social media an hour more per week than the average UK person or American!
This is great. What if you have a FBML tab set up as landing page for non-fans that says "like" to see the rest of our content. Will it track the "likes" based on a call to action from the FBML tab?
Hi Claudia – sorry in the delay getting back to you; this one took some digging.
Right now, FBML tabs that are set up as you describe are not accessible for the Facebook Likes plug-in that we're using for coverage (e.g. accessing the "Likes" on them would be similar to accessing internal FB content). However, this is an area we are actively looking into adding coverage support for. Great question!
Great blogs post!
Very clear description and distinction of what's tracked. I echo Matt's question, would be great to understand what portion of status updates on FB are public, does facebook's analytics team provide any insight?
Interested in long term direction on Facebook. Lot's of big brands are investing in Facebook platform solutions for managing brand presence, multiple fan pages and moderation… platforms such as Involver, Context Optional, Vitrue, Buddy media, etc… essentially Facebook "Preferred Developers" all of which have API's. Any integration there to further analyze and monitor engagement on places other than the FB Wall as fanbases start to balloon into the hundreds of thousands or millions of users would really be excellent.
http://developers.facebook.com/preferreddeveloper…
regards – ali
Hey there Ali,
It is tough to speculate on the portion of updates that are public – although @bengrill's comment above does not sound surprising to me. There is a lot of speculation, and it is my opinion as well, that many personal wall status updates are accidentally public (e.g. via a misunderstanding of privacy settings). Interesting reference here: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/14/your-public-f…. However, Pages are often public and I think most people participate will full awareness that they are engaging in a public discussion.
As for the long term direction – looking forward to discussing with you. I agree that methods for analyzing and making sense large data is an important direction.
Great blogs post!
Very clear description and distinction of what's tracked. I echo Matt's question, would be great to understand what portion of status updates on FB are public, does facebook's analytics team provide any insight?
Interested in long term direction on Facebook. Lot's of big brands are investing in Facebook platform solutions for managing brand presence, multiple fan pages and moderation… platforms such as Involver, Context Optional, Vitrue, Buddy media, etc… essentially Facebook "Preferred Developers" all of which have API's. Any integration there to further analyze and monitor engagement on places other than the FB Wall as fanbases start to balloon into the hundreds of thousands or millions of users would really be excellent.
http://developers.facebook.com/preferreddeveloper…
regards – ali
Hey there Ali,
It is tough to speculate on the portion of updates that are public – although @bengrill's comment above does not sound surprising to me. There is a lot of speculation, and it is my opinion as well, that many personal wall status updates are accidentally public (e.g. via a misunderstanding of privacy settings). Interesting reference here: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/14/your-public-f…. However, Pages are often public and I think most people participate will full awareness that they are engaging in a public discussion.
As for the long term direction – looking forward to discussing with you. I agree that methods for analyzing and making sense large data is an important direction.
Hey guys!
so i´ve noticed that facebook monitoring works "fine" when settings for region filter are set to "all" or United Estates. – How about for other regions?
Here in Colombia doesn´t works… ovbiously.
This is true – at the moment Facebook posts are associated with the USA. There are a couple challenges associated with regional filtering of Facebook updates, one of which relates to privacy settings. While some Facebook users may set their privacy settings to allow publicly available status updates, they often do not make available information for their location. However, this is something that we're looking into – and understand how important this is for those of us outside the USA.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Amber Naslund, David Alston, P-A Lalonde, Jean-Luc SansCartier, Solvis Consulting and others. Solvis Consulting said: RT @ambercadabra: What Does Radian6 Listen To On Facebook? http://bit.ly/9HvJaW [...]
Hey guys!
so i´ve noticed that facebook monitoring works "fine" when settings for region filter are set to "all" or United Estates. – How about for other regions?
Does Radian 6 send alerts to my email address (if set up to do so) when someone posts on our Facebook wall.? I understand it does not pull in comments and alert on those in any capacity just yet, but i need to have post alerts sent to me 24/7, as I am not on Radian 6 all weekend and all night to monitor when some of the most potentially dangerous posts occur.
I was told that Radian 6 does have alert capabilities, but would like to hear it again, as its so important to us. thanks!
Hi Hayley – we can send alerts to your email address when an on-topic post (e.g. any post that shows up in your Topic Profile) is posted on your page, and are currently working on a solution for capturing all posts and comments on your Page – even if they do not contain any keywords listed in your Topic Profile.
Any update here, I think most major brands would be itching for this.
Does Radian 6 send alerts to my email address (if set up to do so) when someone posts on our Facebook wall.? I understand it does not pull in comments and alert on those in any capacity just yet, but i need to have post alerts sent to me 24/7, as I am not on Radian 6 all weekend and all night to monitor when some of the most potentially dangerous posts occur.
I was told that Radian 6 does have alert capabilities, but would like to hear it again, as its so important to us. thanks!
I agree with Gordon – the one useful feature that is missing is regional filtering. Is this likely to become possible?
I know for example Meltwater Buzz have found a way to do this based on using metadata on user/ page profiles.
Thanks!
I agree with Gordon – the one useful feature that is missing is regional filtering. Is this likely to become possible?
I know for example Meltwater Buzz have found a way to do this based on using metadata on user/ page profiles.
Thanks!
Hi Ryan, thanks for the article. There's something I don't understand. When you say this "So if 20 people Like an on-topic piece of content where you’ve got the plugin installed, we’ll count it in the Votes and Likes metric in your dashboard", what do you mean by "a piece of content were YOU'VE got the facebook plugin installed"? Does it mean that it only picks up on-topic occurrences within my own blog for instance? Or would it pick it on other blogs which have a FB plug in and have an on topic post?
Thanks in advance,
Good question – that was in reference to your content, but it will indeed pick up on other blogs which have a FB plugin (so you can still see "Votes and Likes" for other blogs in addition to your own).
Hi Ryan, thanks for the article. There's something I don't understand. When you say this "So if 20 people Like an on-topic piece of content where you’ve got the plugin installed, we’ll count it in the Votes and Likes metric in your dashboard", what do you mean by "a piece of content were YOU'VE got the facebook plugin installed"? Does it mean that it only picks up on-topic occurrences within my own blog for instance? Or would it pick it on other blogs which have a FB plug in and have an on topic post?
Thanks in advance,
Hello, I am a R6 user and want to know if there is any feature in your product roadmap that will cover tracking facebook comments under public wall updates?.
Hi Aaron – there is, and that is what we are working towards. We view that capability as critical from a measurement and monitoring perspective.
[...] nella propria strategia di listening ed engagement ed approfondire l’approccio della piattaforma Radian6 al [...]
[...] The first thing we need to understand about Facebook is that far from all content is possible to index due to people privacy settings. I saw on a blog post one comment saying that in Australia only around 3% of the Facebook accounts are set to “Everyone”. Ryan Strynatka from radian6 elaborates further on the topic and what he claims Radian6 to cover. [...]
[...] Radian6 taps into the Facebook Graph API, allowing it to pull any updates of users with “everyone” privacy settings, as well as mentions on Page updates and user posts to Page wall posts walls that are always public. It can also track Likes to Open Graph websites. Radian6 can’t access any user content with restricted privacy settings, or comments on Page wall posts. [...]
[...] Radian6 taps into the Facebook Graph API, allowing it to pull any updates of users with “everyone” privacy settings, as well as mentions on Page updates and user posts to Page wall posts walls that are always public. [...]
Hi,
i'm Radians 6 user.
I gonna try some software (cloud) like Socialbakers Page Analytics.
Before starting, I would like to know if Radian 6 is able to give me some analytics like number of fans, % of grownth, admin wall post…(please have a glance here http://analytics.socialbakers.com/#tab_posts)
Thanks for your post;
regards;
MAthieu
Hi Claudia – sorry in the delay getting back to you; this one took some digging.
Right now, FBML tabs that are set up as you describe are not accessible for the Facebook Likes plug-in that we're using for coverage (e.g. accessing the "Likes" on them would be similar to accessing internal FB content). However, this is an area we are actively looking into adding coverage support for. Great question!