While Power BI has already had the ability to tap into campaign and brand management analytics for Twitter, solution templates providing similar capabilities for Facebook have been somewhat lacking. Now, through the combination of Azure services and its own researched technologies, Microsoft has made this functionality available to Power BI users.
In terms capabilities, the Campaign/Brand Management for Facebook solution template allows analysts to:
- Get started quickly with pre-built data models for social analytics reporting
- Use an intuitive wizard based UI to define which pages you wish to follow
- Leverage sophisticated visualizations such as the network graph created by Microsoft Research
- Go back in history to do trend analysis to see your growth
Taking into account historic and most recent activity, the solution template allows users to easily identify top authors, trending key phrases, and hashtags across selected Facebook Pages, while also providing the ability to drill down to specific users, posts, and individual posting habits. Analysts can also respond to specific comments by clicking on them in Power BI which will then bring up the Facebook comment in a browser window.
Furthermore, analyses may also include any public Facebook page, providing users with a quick and easy way to compare trends and community engagement with nominated competitors or market segment leaders. By default, the template is configured to extract 90 days" worth of posts and comments for the purposes of month-over-month trend analysis, but this can be adjusted to suit.
Campaign/Brand Management for Facebook is available now for free via Microsoft AppSource, but does require an Azure subscription, a Facebook account, and at least one Facebook page to target.