Connectivity Maps using Advertisement Platforms¶
Social networks, such as Facebook and Linkedin, are widely used by the global population. While caveats regarding data bias collection apply, these social networks can access essential data for many studies. Recently, for example, the Facebook Market platform was used to study the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [FTO+20], to measure cultural differences between urban and rural population [RMT+20], to measure gender gaps [KFTW20] and to monitor refugees and forced immigrants [PAMG+20].
In this tutorial, we will learn the basics of performing a data collection using state-of-the-art libraries to collect data and visualize the results. It covers the basics of using Facebook’s and LinkedIn’s Marketing API to collect valuable data on the number of users that use this social network in a specific region, and several of their characteristics, like their demographics, interests, education and job experience.
We would like to thank Kiran Garimella (garimell@mit.edu) and Emilio Zagheni (zagheni@demogr.mpg.de) for developing the first version of the LinkedIn code this tool was built upon, and Ingmar Weber (iweber@hbku.edu.qa) for kindly sharing it with us.
References:¶
- FTO+20
Masoomali Fatehkia, Isabelle Tingzon, Ardie Orden, Stephanie Sy, Vedran Sekara, Manuel Garcia-Herranz, and Ingmar Weber. Mapping socioeconomic indicators using social media advertising data. EPJ Data Science, 9(1):22, 2020.
- KFTW20
Ridhi Kashyap, Masoomali Fatehkia, Reham Al Tamime, and Ingmar Weber. Monitoring global digital gender inequality using the online populations of facebook and google. Demographic Research, 43:779–816, 2020.
- PAMG+20
Joao Palotti, Natalia Adler, Alfredo Morales-Guzman, Jeffrey Villaveces, Vedran Sekara, Manuel Garcia Herranz, Musa Al-Asad, and Ingmar Weber. Monitoring of the venezuelan exodus through facebook’s advertising platform. Plos one, 15(2):e0229175, 2020.
- RMT+20
Daniele Rama, Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzoni, Kyriaki Kalimeri, and Ingmar Weber. Facebook ads as a demographic tool to measure the urban-rural divide. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020, 327–338. 2020.