Playing with data #2 : Engagement, contents and fans on Facebook (Netvizz/Gephi)

As I just finished my first Coursera MOOC on “Social Network Analysis” (a BIG thanks and congrats to Lada Adamic, our professor on 8 intense weeks of data-tweaking), I wanted to try a few things to complete my “Playing with data” series and explore, this time, Facebook groups. The interest lies in the possibility, for a newcomer or a brand, to get insights and knowledge about the group structure in the biggest social network to date. I’ll be showing a few things as regards Personal network, Group network and Page network.

Your Facebook friends : who make bridges among them ?

I’ve already shown you my Facebook friends network in a very simple way. You can do better by looking who are the people in your network that “connect” your different communities. These “weak links” are important, as they allow information to transfer from one point of your network to the other. Some theories (Ronald Burt’s, in particular) also want that these “brokers” have a considerable influence as they have the ability to look for new ideas in several groups.

Here’s with my network : a few individuals are key in linking my different communities (work, studies, etc). Funny fact : the people you see with the biggest “betweenness” as it is called are the ones I know partying the more in real life. Cheers, mates !

A Facebook group for French expats in Singapore : showing existing relationships

Groups are a strange item in Facebook : they look most of the time like forums, with questions and answers, some spammers/advertisers, and a control gate at the entry (you have to request access to the group). What’s interesting here is to check how social network analysis can show how people are linked between them beyond the group.

Here, with Singafrog, a Facebook group gathering a little bit more than 1 500 French expats in Singapore, we can see people who have the most friends within the group (I’ve erased all names for their privacy), and clusters of people knowing each other.

What are the most engaging contents on a Facebook Fan page ?

Last viz of this post, probably the most interesting from a position of social media strategist or community manager. Here I’ve mapped the interactions between the fans of a page and the last 50 posts. It’s an easy way to know what work best, and also to know your influencers : who interacts the most with your contents (so that you can, say, reward them or invite them IRL).

I’ve been doing this fan page analysis on La Netscouade, my previous employer, where the last 50 posts were liked or commented or shared 551 times by 327 users. You can see both what were the top shared contents, and the top engaging people.

There’s a ton of other info you can get through Netvizz (the app which gathers this data on Facebook) and Gephi (the open-source tool that makes the viz out of your data), provided you’re part of these networks, and you’re limiting yourself to small-sized networks.

Martin Pasquier