Facebook topic data FAQ
What is Facebook topic data?
How many people are on Facebook?
How is this different from Facebook data that has been available before?
What are the big differences between Facebook data and data from other social networks?
What kind of data is available?
How is Facebook ensuring privacy?
Where is the data processed?
Can I see the actual text, images, videos etc from posts?
What‘s the source of the demographic data?
What kind of analysis does topic data support?
Are @Mentions included?
Are both real-time and historical data available?
Which countries does Facebook topic data cover?
What languages do Facebook topic data work in?
Why can’t I just get this information from my brand’s Facebook page?
Why can’t I just use Facebook audience insights for this?
How can I tell if the content I am analyzing is relevant?
How can I train classifiers?
Where do the topics come from?
Can I use this to target Ads on Facebook based on what people are talking about?
What is Facebook topic data?
Topic data is anonymous and aggregated content data about specific activities, events, brand
names and other subjects that people are sharing on Facebook.
How many people are on Facebook?
As of December 31, 2015, there were 1.59 billion monthly active users of Facebook worldwide
(1.04 billion daily active users). This number is rising all the time. Keep up to date with the latest
figures by checking Facebook’s newsroom.
How is this different from Facebook data that has been available before?
Unlike Facebook’s Graph API v1.0 (which surfaced posts that people marked as ‘public’) and
which has now been discontinued, Facebook topic data is able to service aggregate-level
analysis of all Facebook posts and measure engagement via counts of likes, shares and
comments.
What are the big differences between Facebook data and data from other
social networks?
Volume: There are just more people and there is more engagement on Facebook than
anywhere else.
Demographics: Demographics data gives you a better understanding of the audience
that’s engaging on a topic. This isn’t possible when analyzing data from other social
networks.
Topic-level analysis: Posts are classified in real-time into Facebook’s Graph, making it
easy to analyze the topics that are emerging from the millions of posts, comment and
likes. This goes way beyond hashtags.
Depth of meta data for analysis: Facebook data is highly structured with over 60+
attributes available such as the sentiment, topic, comments, likes and demographics
associated with posts.
What kind of data is available?
Facebook topic data contains posts and engagement data (likes, comments, shares). Each item
of data is enriched for easier analysis with more than 60 attributes, including:
Engagement data (Likes/Comments/Shares): Engagement data can be analyzed to
identify the traction that specific content is receiving on Facebook.
Demographics: Author demographics including gender, age-range and location
(country/state).
Sentiment: Positive or Negative sentiment is added as an attribute by Facebook
Topic data: Entities, Topics and categories from the Facebook Graph
How is Facebook ensuring privacy?
The service provides multiple controls:
● Social data never leaves Facebook’s data centers: The underlying data used to create
insights never leaves Facebook’s servers.
● Only the anonymized and aggregated results of analysis queries are delivered outside of
the Facebook data center.
● All personally identifiable information is removed before processing.
● Raw data used for analysis is deleted after 30 days.
● No data from under 18s is included.
Where is the data processed?
Inside Facebook’s data centers.
Can I see the actual text, images, videos, etc. from posts?
No. All Facebook data that is delivered is summarized statistics in aggregate form to protect
user privacy. For example, instead of receiving raw interaction data such as
“I like Coca-Cola!” your result could show that 500 women in Iowa have mentioned Coca-Cola in
a positive way.
What‘s the source of the demographic data?
People enter basic demographic data (gender, city, age) when they register for Facebook.
The data that is provided is normalized into buckets such as country or state and age-range.
What kind of analysis does topic data support?
Facebook provides the biggest source of public opinion data on Earth. Use cases include:
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Market Research
Share of Voice
Creative Content Optimization
Ad Planning
Risk Management
Crisis Monitoring
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
Are @Mentions included?
No, @mentions are not included in topic data.
Are both real-time and historical data available?
Each post included in Facebook topic data is available for analysis for 30 days rolling windows
only, which begin when you start recording. Data counts are updated up to the minute.
Which countries does Facebook topic data cover?
North America:
United States, Canada, Mexico
South America:
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras,
Martinique, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Saint Barthelemy, Saint
Martin, Uruguay, Venezuela
Europe:
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, Italy,Portugal,
Spain, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland,
Cyprus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Malta, Serbia, Slovenia
Middle East and Africa:
Kenya, Mauritius, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Bahrain, Iraq,
Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, United Arab Emirates,
Asia/Pacific
Afghanistan, American Samoa, Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Bhutan, Cook Islands,
Christmas Island, Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Hong Kong, Indonesia,
India, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Kiribati, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Laos, Sri
Lanka, Marshall Islands, Myanmar, Mongolia, Macau, Mariana Islands, Maldives,
Malaysia, New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, Nepal, Nauru, Niue, New Zealand, French
Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Pakistan, Pitcairn Islands, Palau, Solomon
Islands, Singapore, Thailand, Tajikistan, Tokelau, East Timor, Turkmenistan, Tonga,
Tuvalu, Taiwan, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Vanuatu,
Wallis and Futuna, Samoa
What languages do Facebook topic data work in?
Topic extraction is available in 11 languages:
Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish,
Turkish, Vietnamese
and sentiment is available in 7 languages:
English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish
Why can’t I just get this information from my brand’s Facebook page?
Unlike Page Insights, Facebook topic data is not limited to only your pages or selected pages, it
includes insights from all posts and engagement data across Facebook. Page Insights is only
based on liked Pages, whereas topic data provides in-depth insights based on the content
people are posting and sharing on Facebook.
Why can’t I just use Facebook audience insights for this?
Audience Insights is only based on “Likes” whereas topic data provides in-depth insights based
on the content people are posting and sharing on Facebook.
How can I tell if the content I am analyzing is relevant?
As of Q4 2015, Facebook topic data will contain a sample of Super Public Content.
Super Public Content is defined as posts:
1) Published by people who have a “Follow” setting enabled in their profile.
2) and the post is posted with Privacy Setting set as public.
3) and the post is not on the timeline of another person.
Super Public content helps you validate the results in your analysis by viewing lists of posts that
match your selected criteria and by using detailed posts to adjust filters and remove unwanted
content.
How can I train classifiers?
As of Q4 2015, Facebook topic data will contain a sample of Super Public Content.
Super Public Content is defined as posts:
1) Published by people who have a “Follow” setting enabled in their profile.
2) and the post is posted with Privacy Setting set as public.
3) and the post is not on the timeline of another person.
Super Public content can be used as a training set for classifiers and machine learning
algorithms. Tag the training set to help algorithms make associations between themes of
interest and the keywords and phrases people use to describe them.
Where do the topics come from?
Every post is reviewed against Facebook’s Graph taxonomy. These topics are constantly
updated and evolving. Topic analysis pinpoints which brands, products and concepts are
mentioned most often. Filter by sentiment to see which topics are most often mentioned
positively or negatively. Topic analysis also surfaces the issues you didn’t know you should be
interested in.
Can I use this to target Ads on Facebook based on what people are talking
about?
No. The results/analysis cannot be used directly for ad targeting. However, the audience
demographic and topics can be used to inform your advertising strategy.