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What data is CrowdTangle tracking?
What data is CrowdTangle tracking?

Many accounts come in automatically, but users can always add any accounts they like.

T
Written by Tess
Updated over a week ago

CrowdTangle is a public insights tool from Facebook that helps publishers, journalists, researchers, fact-checkers and more follow, analyze, and report on what's happening across social media. We do that by making public content from Pages, Groups, Instagram accounts, and popular subreddits more discoverable, and engagement data on that content, (i.e. shares, views, comments, and reactions) easy to sort through at scale. CrowdTangle does not track content from regular Facebook profiles.

Learn more below about what data we do and don't track, and what types of Pages and accounts are included in our database.

What accounts do we track?

It's different per platform. Our ultimate goal is to track every “influential” account on these platforms, including all Verified users, profiles, and accounts like celebrities, athletes, sports teams, politicians, non-profits, CEOs, journalists, media and publishers, public figures and the like. CrowdTangle is *not* meant to track “regular” people, like Dan down the street who just took a picture of a fire. It's also not capable of tracking overall usage and impressions for hashtags.

Here's what we cover now:

  • Facebook: 7M+ Facebook pages, groups, and verified profiles. This includes all public Facebook pages with more than 25K Page Likes or Followers (automated via API), all public Facebook groups with 95k+ members, all US-based public groups with 2K+ members, and all verified profiles.

  • Instagram: 2M+ public Instagram accounts. This includes all public Instagram accounts with more than 50K followers, as well as all verified accounts.

  • Reddit: ~20K+ of the most active sub-reddits. Built and maintained in partnership with Reddit.

Users can add any accounts they like to our system, so if the account you want to track was not added automatically, you can add it yourself!

The table below summarizes the percentage of Facebook Pages active in the last 28 days that CrowdTangle tracks, broken down by number of Page Likes or Followers (last updated 8/06/2021). It does not include places (like this example), which do not contain any posts.

What metrics do we track?

CrowdTangle exclusively tracks public content. CrowdTangle can tell you when something was posted, from which Page/account/etc it was posted, and how many interactions (likes, comments, etc) it earned at any given point in time. Likewise, it can tell you how many views a video got when it was posted directly on a Page or account and how many views it got after it was shared out by other Pages/accounts.

CrowdTangle doesn't track metrics like reach or impressions, however. And it doesn't provide demographic information on the users who have interacted with content. So while it can tell you a particular post has earned 1,000 likes, it can't tell you who liked it, where they were from, their age, etc.

What metrics and accounts don't we track?

We do not track data around:

  • Reach

  • Impressions

  • Revenue

  • 1-min video views

  • Unfollows

  • Link Clicks

  • Any demographic information (age, gender, etc.) on the post or page-level. 

  • Whether or not content has been fact-checked

We don't support the following types of content:

  • Facebook/Instagram Stories. We do not track any ephemeral content.

  • Facebook Events are not currently tracked in CrowdTangle.

  • Facebook Fundraisers are not currently tracked in CrowdTangle.

  • Facebook Watch Parties. 

  • Geo-gated Facebook posts. Posts that are gated to specific countries do not show up in CrowdTangle. Sports content is a common example. Often broadcast rights are negotiated region by region, or country by country. A particular Facebook page might only have rights to post a live feed of a football match in Mexico, so the posts will be geo-gated to Mexico. CrowdTangle will not be able to surface these posts.

  • Age-gated Facebook posts. This includes Branded Content posts for alcohol, tobacco, or other products that have age restrictions by law.

  • Ads. While CrowdTangle may include boosted organic posts, you would need to cross-reference with the Ad Library to identify them as boosted. CrowdTangle does not include any paid ads.

  • Removed posts and accounts. Posts or accounts that have been removed from Facebook or Instagram are not accessible in CrowdTangle.

  • Profile photo or cover photo update posts. When you update your profile photo (for a Page) or update the cover photo, Facebook will generate a post. CrowdTangle will not track those posts.

We don't support the following types of accounts: 

  • Private Facebook Groups. A group must be public to be tracked in CrowdTangle, which means that user posts in public groups are available. Please note that "private groups" were formerly referred to as Closed or Secret. 

  • Private Instagram accounts. By default, anyone can see a profile and their posts on Instagram. Users can make their account private so that only followers can see what they share. This can happen at any time and can be switched back and forth. If their account is set to private, the content will be be made unavailable. It can take up to 24 hours for a change to the private or public setting of an account to be reflected in CrowdTangle.

  • Facebook Personal Profiles. Personal profiles are generally not available in CrowdTangle. The only exceptions are profiles that are verified and have the follow button turned on -- those will be available in CrowdTangle. This is a very small subset of profiles, including Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, politicians, and journalists. Inside the product, they are referred to as Verified Public Profiles.

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