One of the major USP of this latest release is vast breadth of data sources which are being supported amongst which the social media data connector for Facebook and Twitter stands out. Now with MicroStrategy 10 we can directly connect to Facebook and Twitter and source information from these social media sites to understand the customer pulse on a certain brand, product, service, organization, event etc.
In this post we are trying to exhibit how we can source data from a Facebook Page using MicroStrategy 10’snative data connector and use the same to analyse further. For the current example we have taken the Facebook page of Gucci.
The first step is to select the relevant Facebook page and import the data from there.
It is possible to specify the time frame for which you would want to fetch the Facebook post related data for the page and analyse the same. For pages which are very active it could be in hours or minutes as well. We also have the custom option to specify the date range between a specific range. For the current example we have taken the data from the Facebook page of Gucci for the last 180 days.
Once the necessary selections are made data would be imported from the Facebook page and separate In Memory datasets are created for Page, Posts, Comments and Likes. Following are details for the separate datasets created.
Page – This dataset captures the detail of all the information related to the Facebook page in general. The attributes would capture page related information like when Name, About, Link, Username, Location etc. The metrics captured are
- Likes - Number of likes received by the Page
- Talking About - This is the actual number of Facebook users who are 'engaged' and interacting with that Facebook Page. The people who actually come back to the page liking the page. This include activities such as comments, likes to a post, shares etc. by visitors to the page
- Check-ins – Number of check-ins received by the Facebook page
- Where Here - How many check-ins, mobile device "location shares", photo tagging the page has accrued
Post – This dataset forms the anchor to which the data of the other two tables (Comments and Likes) is related. The attributes capture information related to the posts like Time, Description, ID etc. The metrics captured are:
- Shares – Number of times the post is shared
- Likes – Number of likes received by the post
- Comments – Number of comments received by the post
The Post dataset is linked to the Comment and Like dataset through Post ID
Comments – This dataset captures details for the comments which were made for the posts posted on the Facebook page. The attributes capture information like who made the Comment, Post ID, Comment text etc. The metric captured is:
- Comments Like – Number of likes received by the comment
Like – This dataset captures detail of the likes received by the posts made on the Facebook page. This includes who liked, Like ID etc.
Once
the datasets are created we can either further use data wrangling feature to
cleanse the data or import it as-it-is to create the In Memory cube. Once the
In Memory cube is created the same can be used to create a dashboard / report
to perform the necessary analysis. Here we have tried to create one.
Here is a brief on the different sections of the dashboard:
- Section 1 – Helps you to know which is the most popular post made on the Facebook of Gucci based upon number comments, likes and shares
- Section 2 – Trend of the number of comments received by the Facebook page over date. Helps to understand how has been the user interaction trend during the past 180 days
- Section 3 – Vital KPIs for the Facebook page
- Section 4 – Help to know which are the most popular Comments (made on posts) in terms of Likes received by the comment