Manage your Insights data sources

You can monitor conversations from specific Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, and LinkedIn Pages in Insights. Track posts, comments, and hashtags to analyze mentions around specific topics, and explore how people are talking about them. To comply with social network privacy policies, you need to allow Insights to collect data on your behalf.

The following table lists the data that Insights can collect.

Note: "Owned" data sources refer to the posts (paid and organic) and comments on those posts for Pages and accounts you administrate. "Non-owned" data sources refer to posts and comments on other people's or company's accounts.

Add your data sources

To include data in your searches, you need to add each account and hashtag that you want to monitor as a targeted data source.

Before you begin

Before Insights can collect data from your Facebook Pages, Instagram Business accounts, and LinkedIn Pages, each social network's privacy policies require that you authenticate those accounts. Your Instagram Business accounts need to be connected to Facebook Pages too. See Connect an Instagram account to a Facebook Page for details on setting up your Business accounts.

Add an owned account to Insights

You can add your own Facebook Pages, Instagram Business accounts, and LinkedIn Pages as data sources.

1. Go to More, and then select Insights.
2. Select Data management, and then select Track Data Sources.
3. Select your data source and then select Next.
4. Connect your data source and give Insights permission to collect data. You'll see your name in the Who is connected section of Data management.
5. Select the accounts you want to add to Insights as tracked data sources, and then select Track.

Invite another user to authenticate with Facebook

If you don't have access to the Facebook account that owns the Page you want to monitor, you can invite the account admin or another person with access to the account to authenticate for you. They don't have to be an Insights member to authenticate the Facebook account.

1. Go to More, and then select Insights.
2. Select Data management, and then select Track Data Sources.
3. Select Owned Facebook Pages and Instagram Accounts and then select Next.
4. Select Copy to copy the link and then share it with the person who can authenticate the Facebook account.

Add an Instagram hashtag

To add an Instagram hashtag as a targeted data source, you need to have one of your own Instagram Business accounts added to Insights. See the previous section Add an owned account to Insights for details. Up to 30 hashtags can be tracked for each authenticated Instagram account. Insights starts collecting data as soon as you add the data sources, but can't retrieve any data for the period before that.

1. In Insights, select Data management, and then select Track Data Sources.
2. Select Instagram Hashtags, and then select Next.
3. Select an Instagram account from the list, and then enter the hashtags you want to track, separated by commas or spaces.
4. Select the acknowledgment about your hashtag quota, and then select Add.

Add a non-owned Facebook Page or Instagram account

You can add Facebook Pages, Instagram Business accounts, and Instagram Creator accounts that aren’t your own as data sources. To add a non-owned data source, you need at least one Facebook account authenticated with Insights. See the previous section Add an owned account to Insights for instructions.

1. In Insights, select Data management, and then select Track Data Sources.
2. Select Other Facebook Pages or Other Instagram Pages, and then select Next.
3. Enter the accounts you want to track by username (or Page URL or ID for Facebook Pages), separated by commas or spaces, and then select Track.

If you get an error that an account cannot be found, check for typos. It’s also possible the Instagram account is not a Business or Creator account connected to a Facebook Page.

To add accounts in bulk, you can upload a CSV of Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts. CSV files should contain a single column of accounts with no header.

Inactive data sources

In Data management, if you see an Inactive status in any of your lists of tracked data sources, it means that the social network used to authenticate and track that data source needs to be reconnected. To reconnect, complete the following steps:

1. Select Track Data Sources.
2. Select the account marked as inactive, and then select Next.
3. Reconnect your account.

Delete a data source

Remove targeted data sources when they’re no longer relevant, or when you need to make room for new data sources. Deleting a targeted data source is permanent and cannot be undone, but you'll keep the content collected from it so far.

1. In Insights, select Data management.
2. Select the tab for the type of data source you want to delete.
3. Locate the data source (account or hashtag) in the list, point to it, and then select Delete .
4. Select Confirm.