FUN – Self-Assessment of your social presence in fb using Power BI

If you read the title of this post & were wondering, What the hell is that ? , Trust me I have no clue how I made this up but I felt it would be an appropriate title when someone wants to perform data analysis on their fb data to understand how much active they are on fb YoY or month-on-month, who are your good friends, who like your posts the most & discover some long lost friends who were your good friends earlier but have lost touch.

Assumption: The modern definition of good friend is the friend who likes your all your post or activity in Facebook 😉

One might feel data analysis of your fb activity may be completely useless task until you discover some insights about your life or persona changes reflected in your fb activity. Data Analysis is like a treasure hunt where all your efforts are useless until you hit the jackpot. In this blog I would reflect some of the insights which I discovered after analyzing my fb data using Power BI and relating it to some of the changes in my life.

Warning: The following data analysis might be a complete waste of your time and highly non-productive. Any accidental learning from this post might be completely coincidental & at your own risk.

Here is the PowerBI dashboard of my Facebook activity

Lets dig into some insights which I discovered from the dashboard

• So I have posted 203 posts from 2009 till date with around 2835 likes which averages to around 14 likes per post which is not that bad. At any given point in time I have atleast 14 friends who likes my activity on fb.
• I have got the most number of likes (210 & 135) when my books got published and my friends really liked me for getting published which means I should continuing doing it 🙂
• I was most active in Facebook in the year 2012 but after that my activity dropped significantly in the year 2013 which is the year I got married ( No further insights might be warranted on this as it is self-explanatory).
• The Word cloud which is the new custom visual available in Power BI gallery emphasizes & amplifies some of the good friends I have who have liked my posts & activity on fb. If I slice the data for the year 2013, the word cloud looks as shown below
  Year 2013 is the only time when my wife Charmi has liked my fb posts the most and then we got married & rest is history. So here is the data I have that I can share with my wife that post marriage Husbands are no longer appreciated any more. On the other side, Can husbands afford to not like any posts from their wives ???

On the other hand, When I sliced my data for the year 2009, I found few friends who used to like me very much but have lost touch somewhere so I am planning to connect with them again while when I slice the data for the year 2015, I have found some new friends in there.

• Another interesting insight which I discovered from the type of my posts in FB is, until the year 2013 majority of my posts are status updates but off late I don’t like sharing much of the status updates & occasionally I just log in facebook and re-share videos or link I found interesting. I guess that has something to do with my maturity where in earlier, I just posted anything or everything which I did as status updates but slowly I don’t like doing status update as much.

• Finally I discovered that I am most active on FB in the month of December which may be due to the Holidays and least active in the month of Jun & Nov which are the times when I like to take vacations since June is our anniversary while Nov is my wife’s birthday.

If anyone is interested to reuse my Power BI dashboard, Please little r me or message me and I will be happy to share the *.pbix file for your self-assessment.

Hope this helps !!!

Parikshit Savjani
Sr. Premier Field Engineer