This document provides instructions for mining social media data from Facebook using R. It describes how to set up a Facebook API, download 50,000 posts from a Facebook page between specific dates, clean and analyze the data, and create visualizations including cumulative count plots, reaction plots, and a word cloud. The key steps are setting up a Facebook app ID and secret for authentication, downloading posts and reactions, saving the data, calculating engagement statistics, and generating various charts and a word cloud for analysis.

1. Mining Social Media data in R
Set up Facebook API and download data
November 21, 2017
Seongho An, MSW | School of Social Policy and Practice , University of Pennsylvania
Workshop for MSSP630

2. Potential of Social media

4. Set up Facebook API
Go to Facebook API page (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api) and log in
with your Facebook id and password
Click “Add a
New App”

5. Set up Facebook API
Create a name you like
Put your current email
Click “Create App ID”

6. Set up Facebook API
Click Settings

7. Set up Facebook API
App ID and App Secret are automatically created. You will need them in authentication
Click “Add Platform”

8. Set up Facebook API
Put your own website URL. If you don’t have any,
use my website for this workshop.
*This has nothing to do with your data work in R

9. Set up Facebook Api in R
Install necessary packages
App ID App Secret
Copy this URL

10. Set up Facebook Api in R
Paste the URL in the "Valid OAuth redirect URIs"
Paste the URL in the ”Website"

11. Download Facebook data
Download 50,000 posts sent between 11/01/2016 and 10/31/2017 by the
Facebook page PennSP2
Reactions: R will get the
total count of Facebook
reactions: love, haha, wow,
sad, angry.
Feed: If TRUE, the function
will also return posts on
the page that were made
by others

12. Download Facebook data
View your created data frame named sp2_post

13. Download Facebook data
View your created data frame named sp2_post

14. Download Facebook data
Save the data as a CSV file

15. Sentiment analysis
Install and library necessary packages
To install rCharts, you
need these three lines of
code

16. Sentiment analysis
Import the data file. Make sure the data file is in your working directory (getwd())

17. Sentiment analysis
Clean and Standardize timestamps

18. Sentiment analysis
Calculating statistics of engagement

19. Sentiment analysis
Calculating statistics of engagement

20. Sentiment analysis
Average number of posts per day

21. Sentiment analysis
Average number of likes per day

22. Sentiment analysis
Generate a cumulative count plot

23. Sentiment analysis
Generate a plot for Facebook reactions

24. Sentiment analysis
Generate a cumulative count plot

25. Sentiment analysis
Generate an interactive chart

26. Word cloud
26
Import the data file. Make sure the data file is in your working directory

27. Word cloud
27
Clean up the messages by removing special characters, symbols, and
punctuations

28. Word cloud
28
Import the data file. Make sure the data file is in your working directory

29. Word cloud
29