Show Me The Social Media Trends for 2021
Yet with great powers comes great responsibility. Over the last years, in order to better protect the privacy of its users, Facebook has been adapting the way they work with social listening partners such as Talkwalker. After a first wave of API changes in 2018, the company started an extensive review process of the way all of its partners used its API in April 2020, which ramped up the following changes in its API this summer.
What do these changes in Facebook and Instagram API mean in practice?
As there has never been any Facebook or Instagram Firehose, the public APIs of these networks need to be accessed through individual user tokens - basically, if you have an active Facebook account, congratulations, you have a token! Facebook thus requires Talkwalker users to provide a token to be able to access any of its data.
Before the changes in policies, your Talkwalker queries would collect data from a variety of popular official pages (e.g. media). The recent API update now requires Talkwalker users to actively select the Instagram & Facebook pages they want to monitor.
What does this mean? Facebook & Instagram data remain accessible in Talkwalker Analytics, but specific pages or hashtags need to be added to each project in order for the platform to monitor the page and collect results, including those connected to your regular social listening queries.
What Facebook and Instagram data can you get with Talkwalker?
1. Data from owned Facebook & Instagram pages
The Facebook and Instagram insights of your own company pages can be accessed directly in Talkwalker once you’ve added them to your project. In practice, this means that owned page metrics such as real reach, video views, audience insights or even Instagram Stories metrics can be accessed directly on the Talkwalker platform, on top of the mentions of your Facebook or Instagram pages by other users. This data is exclusively for you and will not be shared with any other client.
2. Data from Facebook libraries
As part of our latest release, you can now create your very own Data Library, to collect relevant Facebook data to feed your topics without the need to monitor all channels and collect all data from each one. They offer you a comprehensive look at the data surrounding your brand, company, product, or industry issue. You can either select a list of pages that you want to monitor yourself, or use a predetermined selection of pages developed by Talkwalker.
These predefined libraries will dramatically increase your Facebook data analysis capabilities, while being easy to set up. In a matter of minutes, you can monitor pages curated especially for your industry or region, with real-time engagement metrics highlighting what matters most to your audience at any time on the platform.
This new feature is fully compliant with Facebook’s terms and conditions.
3. Data from Facebook reviews
You can now gather Facebook review data from your owned channels. This includes the review content, timestamp, and the review rating or recommendation. Plus any replies to the reviews.
4. Data from non-owned Instagram pages
You are able to monitor the activity of Instagram Business Accounts and Creator Profiles that you add to your project channels, whether it is to track your competitors’ social media activities, or to monitor important industry sources or influencers/key opinion leaders. Here again, this data is exclusively for you and will not be shared with any other client.
5. Data from specific Instagram hashtags
You also have the option to track Instagram hashtags on topics of interest, such as for events or trending hashtags within your industry.
6. Data from your ads on Facebook and Instagram
We recently added paid social to our coverage, which means that depending on your package, you may access all of your Facebook and Instagram ad performance metrics straight into Talkwalker.
What if a platform decides not to comply with these Facebook policies?
The rule is simple: comply with the Platform Terms and Developer Policies (specifically point 5.b), or run the risk of losing your API access.
