How to Use Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

Photo by CarbonNYC

In this tutorial, I am going to show how to use Wolfram Alpha to generate useful statistics based on your Facebook data. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that you can use to generate reports or calculations on any scientific or mathematical inquiries.

Recently, Wolfram Alpha launched its personal analytic for Facebook.  Now you can use this powerful search engine to draw insights on your social media activities and interactions. The only thing you need to do is get a basic free account and type in “Facebook Report” on the search bar and hit enter.

Take a look at my step by step tutorial to guide you on how this is done.

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As you can see, creating the report is quick and straightforward. You would also notice that the report is quite interactive and can provide you with the most detailed information you require.

What’s inside the report?

The first major part of the report shows statistics on Facebook activity. Here is a sample report which is based on my Facebook data.

Number of posts per month

My Facebook profile is quite new. I post a lot of links mostly social media stuff I read from blogs and websites.  I do need to post more of my own content.

Weekly Post Distribution

I work between 9 AM to 6 PM. I am most active on weekdays and my most active day is Monday.

number of likes, comments and post lengths

Yes. I do share a lot of post from YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and blogs mostly about social media stuff. Here is a word could of my posts:

Word Cloud

As you can see, I do a lot of sharing from my other social networks. I connected my other social media account to my Facebook. Some of my connections are automated. For instance, my Twitter feed automatically post recent tweets to my Facebook wall. My recent blogs from WordPress are also automatically promoted on my wall. I also share my pins from my Pinterest boards.

Weekly App Activity

Another major section of the report tackles statistics on your friends. As seen from the results below, most of my friends are male.

Facebook Friend’s Gender Distribution

Majority my friends are married. You can also see that most of my friends between 20-30 years old are single, engaged or on a relationship. Beyond that range, my friends tend to be married.

Facebook Friend’s Relationship Statuses Distribution

Here is the age distribution of my friends.  It is also fun to know who is the oldest and youngest among them.

Distribution of Reported Ages

It is noteworthy to know where your friends are. Do you have a friend in each country?

Facebook Friends Location

As of the moment, Wolfram Alpha can only generate this report for your personal Facebook account. I would be great though to have the same information for Facebook pages. Would you agree?

Online Learning with GROVO

Photo by Sarah M Stewart

Today I have discovered an online education and training website called Grovo. It boast of more than a thousands of tutorials of various Internet products like Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and so on. The lessons are presented by a series of simple to understand video tutorials. Each lesson is  between 1-2 minutes long. The courses are straight-forward. Once you have completed the basic lessons, you can proceed to a more advance lessons.  You can test what you have learned by taking the quizzes after each lesson. Once you have finish a course, you can also get a certification of  your favorite Internet application. If you want to know more, click on Grovo. Sign up is free and easy using your Facebook account.

How to Use ShortStack to Create a Facebook Contest

Would you like to increase the engagement activity in your Facebook page? You have a marketing strategy and that you would require names and emails of your target customers. Would you like them to give you their information?

Why not run a contest? Stir up a buzz by doing a sweepstakes. Everybody loves free stuffs and winning it by chance makes it even more exciting.  Raffle off a very nice price that they won’t want to miss out on.  This is a great way to promote your page and increase your fan base. You can also do a photo or video contest. Let your fans participate by submitting their own photos or videos; or voting for the photos or videos they like. I am sure this will build a lot of hype and engagement to your page.

Running a Facebook contest, however, is not that simple and straightforward. There is a right or should I say ‘legal’ way of doing so. According to the Facebook Page Terms and Standards, promotions should be run using a third party app. This includes sweepstakes and contests of any form. Using the like button and other features and functionality within Facebook is not allowed in any promotional activity. If you do this, Facebook can delete or remove your page.

So, what is the right way of doing a contest? Use an app. In this tutorial, I show you how to create your own Facebook contest the right way by using an app template available at ShortStack.

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ShortStack is a design tool which allows you to create your custom Facebook tabs to suite your promotional needs. It also has a variety of widgets and templates which you can use to run your contest right away.  You can use ShortStack for free if you just need to run a simple sweepstakes contest. However, you need to avail of their paid services for several features like database storage for storing your promotional entries and analytics for monitoring your interactions over time.

Go to my Facebook page to see my sample contest. Let me know if you have any questions regarding this tutorial. Have a great day!