[Air-L] Software to extract content of Facebook & Twitter (some conclusions)

[Cristina Aced]

Hi everyone!

and thank you for your suggestions!! Many thanks José Manuel, Noha, Tijana,
Stu, Tobias, Patricia, Harju, Craig, Tim & Bernhard!

As promised, here you have my first impressions of the options you have
suggested to extract data from Facebook. As I explained in previous
messages, I need to gather the content published by companies on blogs,
Twitter and Facebook (posts, tweets, status) with their date information
and all the feedback received: number of comments/ RT/ mentions/ likes
/shares and so on.

After considering all your suggestions and trying some of them:

• I'm using *OutWit Hub* <http://www.outwit.com/>  (the free version is
very complete) to scrape blogs and Twitter accounts. It is necessary to
create scrapers to gather the data you want but it is easy to learn how it
works and you can personalize the scraping. It's a great tool but it
doesn't work properly with Facebook due to Facebook's API limitations :(
• *NodeXL* is a useful tool specially for analyzing connections between
users/ contents on social media and for creating amazing graphs. It also
downloads status updates but the way it shows the information is a little
bit chaotic (i.e. it is not easy to connect the status update with the
comments it has received). Another interesting option: it is possible to
get demographic information about FB's users (genre, location...).
• *NVivo* is fantastic to work with Facebook and Twitter. Very easy to
extract FB's status updates, date & time, comments and number of likes.

To sum up: I have decided to use OutWit Hub to work with blogs and Twitter
and NVivo to work with Facebook.

If you have any doubt about this topic, maybe I can help you, so feel free
to send your doubts and I'll try to answer them!

*Cristina Aced *
PhD Candidate
Doctoral Programme in Knowledge and Information Society
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
| caced at uoc.edu
www.cristinaaced.com/blog | Twitter: @blogocorp