Viz Social User Guide

Version 1.1 | Published January 26, 2022 ©

Facebook

For searching on Facebook, four different methods are offered:

  1. Monitor all Comments under a certain Post on a Page.

  2. Monitor all Posts on a certain Page (and optionally their comments).

  3. Monitor all Comments under a specific Post in a Group.

  4. Monitor all Posts in a specific Group.

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According to the Facebook rules, a Page/User account must be used for all interactions with the network. After Facebook login all authorized Facebook Pages are available for use in the Searches. For the Group Searches, the authenticated user is assumed to be responsible for Searching.

Page Post Monitor

The Facebook Page Post Monitor gives users the ability to harvest all comments under a certain Facebook post on a public page. The Pages for which data collection is enabled become available as accounts in the account selection dropdown. When one of those accounts is chosen, the associated Page name is automatically filled out in the Page field itself. It is possible to collect comments from non-authorized pages, but they are anonymous (no name and no avatar). When choosing account and Page name, Viz Social immediately pre-fetches the last posts on that Page and makes them available for selection by their title (and some metadata). Use the scrollbar to see more posts. Once the monitored post has been selected, the Search immediately starts to retrieve all its comments and continues to do so. The original post itself is always shown at the top of the columns with comments.

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Page Monitor

Facebook Page Monitor gives users the ability to harvest (public) posts on a certain Facebook page. As with the Page Post monitor, the Pages for which data collection is enabled become available as accounts in the account selection dropdown. It is possible to collect Posts from non-authorized Pages, but they are anonymous (no name and no avatar). Once the account/page has been provided, the user can decide in the dropdown menu whether posts from the page owner, posts from other users or all posts are harvested. In addition, the Limit parameter sets the maximum number of historic posts that the Search starts with. Please note that Facebook restricts this latter parameter but doesn’t document how, so we advise not using values larger than 50. There is also a checkbox to allow/prevent comments from being harvested.

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Group Post Monitor

The Facebook Group Post Monitor gives users the ability to harvest all comments under a specific Facebook Group Post. The Groups for which data collection is enabled become available in a dropdown. When one of those Groups is chosen Viz Social immediately pre-fetches the last posts in that Group and makes them available for selection by their title (and some metadata). Use the scrollbar to see more posts. Once the monitored Group post has been selected, the Search immediately starts to retrieve all its comments and will continue to do so. The original post itself is always shown at the top of the columns with comments.
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Group Monitor

Facebook Group Monitor gives users the ability to harvest posts in a certain Facebook group. As with the Group Post monitor, the Groups for which data collection is enabled become available in a dropdown. Once the monitored Group has been selected, the Search immediately starts to retrieve all its Posts and continues to do so.

Comments to posts are not harvested, to do so use the Facebook: Group Post Monitor.

Filters

All Facebook Searches support filtering based on the following parameters:

  • Exact words/terms

  • Exclusion of specific words/terms.

  • Originator

  • Media (type) presence

Facebook Page Post Monitor with Exclude Filter

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Facebook Page Post Monitor with Media Filter

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Facebook Page Post Monitor with Match Filter

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To support such a wide variety of services, the set of relevant and genuine Filters is limited to:

  • Exact words/terms

  • Exclusion of specific words/terms.

  • Media (type) presence