Social media data

You can import social media content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that you have collected with NCapture.

Understand what is imported

NCapture has specific capture types for social media content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Once your NCapture file is imported into NVivo, you may see one or more files depending on the content that has been captured. Capture options

Twitter

A dataset is created containing the Tweets you have captured. Any hyperlinks in the Tweets are retained. If a Tweet includes a link to a media file the media file is not imported into your project, but you can access it from the hyperlink.

If the Tweets are the results of a search in Twitter, you can click the link in the Search Term column in the dataset to perform a new search in Twitter.

By default, user information such as gender or location will be imported along with the Tweets. If this isn't relevant to your research, you can change this behavior in the project properties.

Facebook

A dataset is created containing the Facebook posts you have captured. Any hyperlinks from the posts are retained in the file.

Photos that have been made public are imported into NVivo as separate picture files, and stored in a folder at the same location as the Facebook dataset. The dataset contains a source shortcut that links to the picture. If you click on this shortcut the picture will open in the Detail View. If you code this shortcut, the entire picture file is coded.

By default, user information such as gender or location will be imported along with the posts. If this isn't relevant to your research, you can change this behavior in the project properties.

YouTube

NVivo for Mac does not support working with YouTube videos. You can capture the web page as a PDF for analysis in NVivo.

Explore your data

• Use the sort or filter functions to see patterns in your data. For example, you can filter Tweets to only show those made by a specific user or during a specific date range.
• Hide columns to limit the amount of data you are looking at—for example, you could hide the Location column.
• Manually code data at codes representing themes or cases representing people.
• Use automatic coding techniques to perform broad-brush coding.
• Run a Word Frequency query to identify common themes.
• Run a Text Search query to find all instances of a particular word or phrase.

Gather data over time

Each time you capture data, a new NCapture file is created. When you import NCapture files into your project, by default, any matching social media datasets are merged together.

To be considered matching, the social media properties of the datasets need to be the same:

• Facebook datasets are considered to be matching if they contain wall posts for the same Page, or Group.
• Twitter datasets are considered to be matching if they are based on the same search, user stream, or list.

When matching datasets are merged, any duplicate content is removed.

For example, imagine that you capture Twitter data for the hashtag #climate on Monday and import the NCapture file into your project. Then, on Tuesday and again on Wednesday you also capture Tweets based on the hashtag #climate. When you import these NCapture files into your project, by default, the Tweets from Tuesday and Wednesday are merged together with the dataset from Monday to create a single dataset.