Release Notes 11/11/2010: Facebook Post, Comment, and 'Like' Coverage in Lithium Social Media Monitoring

[#1]

Margaret Francis is VP of Product, where she leads product development strategy and delivery for Lithium Social Media Monitoring.

She is a regular blogger for Lithium and in the Lithosphere you'll see her as MargaretF. You can follow Margaret on Twitter at @margaretfrancis

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Well, Scout-Labs-turned-Lithium-Social-Media-Monitoring fans, friends, and customers, we are VERY pleased to announce that we now have Facebook coverage in the LSMM application.  What is so unbelievably cool about this functionality is that you can select the Facebook page of your choice and get posts, comments and 'like' data in a viewable, trendable form, plus sentiment, quotes, graphs, metrics and reports that use Facebook data.  

Here’s how it works: 

• From within a search, pick the Facebook page you want to monitor for post, comment and like activity. We use the Facebook Search API to find pages that match one or more of your existing search criteria.

• Once you’ve picked a Facebook page to monitor, we’ll fetch the last 45 days of post, comment and like history for that page. Expect it to take about 24 hours for the back data to populate. We use the Facebook FQL API to poll for these posts and comments.

• Sort Facebook wall posts by highest number of comments or likes to see what’s popping. Data stays current to within 24 hours of its publication time on Facebook.

• Filter down by search criteria to get more specific- for instance, how many people on the Ford page in the last month were talking about Mustangs.

• Get sentiment and quotes for posts and comments for Facebook posts and comments on the chosen Facebook page, like so:

• Check out user activity on Facebook pages with metrics, like so:

• You can change the Facebook page associated with a search at any time.  Just be aware that we’re going to start all over getting history for your new Facebook page selection. You can track one Facebook page per search at a time (for now). 

We’ve been working on this functionality for a while and we’re really happy with the level of monitoring available in this initial release.  Remember that however good the API access Facebook offers, the vast majority of Facebook content today seems to be private (We can’t say for sure. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg can).  We’ll never have that private Facebook content, and neither will any other law-abiding character.  

Here’s how I see people using this new functionality:

• Actually seeing the content on your Facebook page. For some of you big brands, I expect you have no idea what is even happening on that Facebook page you started.  You can’t scroll through it fast enough and you can’t download it and look at it later so what ARE those people even posting on your page?  Now you can see the content without clicking through the Facebook interface until you have a repetitive stress injury or trying to find the post in that screenshot you took 2 weeks ago.

• Tracking the growth of a Facebook page over time.  You can see the build in interactions, how posts can kick off chain reactions of comments and conversation, even get a list of all the users that posted or commented on your page. Did that campaign you ran actully promote actual user activity? 

• Competitive intelligence. How are your competitors engaging with the fans on the their pages over time?  Unlike Facebook Insights, which gives page owners some proprietary stats, you don't have to own the page to see public info about it. Do they have a more active and engaged community than you do? Why?     

• Better social media metrics.  Especially if you are building a Facebook presence as part of yoru social media program.     

• Better insights from customers.  What are customers engaging with you (and each other) about on Facebook?  What are they talking to each other about?

The tricky part of this release is how to think about Facebook data. If you pick the "Ford" page to track for your search, you can have ALL content from the Ford page you selected included in your mentions, graphs, metrics, etc., or you can filter the posts and comments for explicit mentions of Ford" or "Mustang" or "Fiesta."  Up to you how to do it.

There's a video you can watch to help you get started. And there are new Facebook training sessions starting next week as well. We’ll be rolling this feature out to the entire customer base over the course of November, so expect a follow up email from your account manager letting you know when the Facebook content feature has been enabled on your account.

Caveats:

• We fully appreciate what a unique source of social media activity and insight Facebook provides. It’s important to remember that the data we provide is only a slice of the total mentions on Facebook.

 

• We're getting 100% coverage of wall posts in the tests we've run, and like data for them, but we aren't getting 100% of comments.  We use the Facebook FQL API to requests comments on each post individually.  Facebook usually, but not always, returns the full set. We know this because when we check the comments we've received with what's visible on the fan page, we sometimes see a disconnect between what the Facebook API publishes and what the Facebook site publishes.  We're still working this one, but it's dependent on Facebook.

 

• If we do detect a discrepancy between the comment count for a post and then number the API gives us, you'll see a message in the app explaining the phenomenon. 

Have I mentioned the way cool exports? Enjoy! 

[#2]

Margaret,

Awesome!  Just cranked this up today and it is already pulling in data.   One of my initial surprises was what it turned up as it crawled Facebook pages related to my search to aid me in selecting which one I want to monitor.  Who knew there were so many Facebook fan pages dedicated to the subject.

Can't way to start trending and disecting the content.

Very cool so far!

Kudos.