Social Analytics - Overview

In this guide we’ll introduce you to key Social Analytics concepts of the Meltwater API and platform.

Meltwater platform

The Meltwater platform ingests and enriches data from a wide variety of sources, including news and social platforms. Data is enriched by a set of enrichments (sentiment, language, key phrases, etc.) and stored in a consistent data schema.

Private data, such as data from owned social connections is held privately for each customer. The Meltwater application accesses this data to provide application features. The Meltwater API is built upon the same platform and data stores.

Social Analytics features of the API allow you to fetch and analyze content and posts on social networks for accounts that you have connected to the Meltwater platform. If you are using one of our BI connectors, this is calling the API behind the scenes for you, using your API credentials.

Owned Social data is content and posts related to ‘owned’ social accounts that you own and have connected to the Meltwater platform. For example, if you connect your owned Facebook account to Meltwater, using the API you can access analytics and posts for this account. This is a subset of Social Analytics, which also includes paid social data, currently not available in the API.

Broadly speaking you can access the same data through the API as a user sees in the application. However, due to social network terms we cannot provide every network and data point in the API.

Sources

When using the API for owned social features you will often be asked for a source. A source in this case is the social network you’d like data for, for example Facebook or Instagram.

The available sources and networks are listed on the Owned Social Metrics page.

Connections

In the Meltwater application you configure a connection to bring data from a social network account into the platform.

Read more about how to set up social connections in our help portal. You can view your owned social connections in the Meltwater application.

Accounts

A social network account, for example on Facebook, for which you provide your credentials in a connection.

Once you’ve connected an account to the Meltwater platform data for that account will be fetched periodically using the credentials you provided.

Fetching Owned Posts

Assuming you have connected one or more social accounts, using the API you will be able to fetch posts (with associated metrics).

To learn how fetch posts using the API see the Fetching Owned Posts guide.

Fetching Owned Analytics

Using the API you can fetch metrics (such as the number of fans your Facebook page has), and analytics (such as when your audience is online, or which are your top performing posts).

The metrics that are available from the API are documented on the Owned Social Metrics page.

To learn how fetch analytics using the API see the Fetching Owned Analytics guide.