Instagram announced it is combining IGTV and feed videos into one format - Instagram Video. With this update, we want to explain how this affects data in quintly.

IGTV data sources not showing new videos

From October 5th onwards, Instagram's APIs classify all new videos as regular feed posts. So far, some of those were marked as IGTV. At quintly we have two separate data sources holding IGTV data, one owning public and another holding private data. Videos created on or after October 5th won't be returned by these data sources anymore. It is expected to see no more IGTV posts from that date onwards.

For historic access, we keep these data sources active for some more weeks. We publish a separate announcement once there is a definite deprecation date.

Videos are now included within regular post data sources

Instead, all videos created on or after October 5th are now included within our regular Instagram posts data sources. Also, here this change applies to both the public and the private data.

What steps do I need to take?

No immediate action is required. IGTV metrics based on the IGTV data sources will stop to show new IGTV videos. You might want to remove these metrics once your analysis completely moves beyond October 5th. On the other side, regular post metrics will show all videos created on or after October 5th. In general, this is an excellent simplification as IGTV videos are not considered a separate format anymore.

We are happy to announce the ability to push data to AWS S3 using our data push feature. This adds another option when building your own data warehouse/data lake.

What is the data push feature?

Part of our mission is to offer simple ways to take your social media data out of quintly to avoid data silos and enable analysis across several sources. Our data push feature handles scenarios where you want to build your data warehouse/data lake. Our system proactively pushes structured data to you on a defined schedule, eliminating extra work on your end.

How does it differentiate from the API or other connectors?

Our API provides a generic interface to take data out of quintly. The data push feature is an extra layer on top of our API. It takes away all of the development work required to connect to and maintain quintly's API. Once activated, it will proactively push the data you need to your data warehouse/data lake on a defined schedule. We make sure nothing goes wrong and provide transparency into each of the data push tasks performed. 

If you want to analyze data on the spot and are not interested in building your own data warehouse/data lake, recently we have expanded our integrations library by adding a native Google Data Studio connector.

Both approaches have pros and cons, but in the true nature of flexibility, we strive to cover each use case.

Where can data be pushed?

With this update, we can push data to an AWS S3 bucket and a Google BigQuery database, covering two popular services offered by AWS and Google Cloud. We look forward to add more destinations very soon.

How to get started?

If you are interested in pushing data to your data warehouse/data lake, please contact our customer service at support@quintly.com or via chat in-app.

Today we are excited to release our new Google Data Studio connector, enabling you to easily integrate quintly data in Google Data Studio. Google Data Studio is a popular tool used to analyze and report across various data sources.

What is this all about?

Measuring the impact of your marketing initiatives requires avoiding data silos and enabling analysis across various sources, Social Media data being one of them. A common use case is connecting your Social Media data with Web Tracking or Sales data.

We understand that analyses spanning several sources cannot be done in quintly alone, and this is why we strongly believe in offering multiple ways to integrate quintly data in third-party solutions. While our API provides a generic interface to take data out, it comes with extra integration effort which is unsuitable for all cases. This is why we have decided to develop native integrations for commonly used business intelligence tools to simplify the integration. Our Google Data Studio connector marks the beginning of a series of new connectors to be developed by our team.

How to get started?

Log into Google Data Studio and find our Google Data Studio connector here. Click "quintly" and you will start right with creating your first data source in Google Data Studio using quintly data.

More connectors coming soon

You can expect us to offer additional connectors for popular business intelligence solutions soon. Next in line is a Tableau connector that we expect to finish in the coming weeks.

YouTube has become increasingly popular among the social networks we track here at quintly. Several of our customers rely on the data we provide to monitor their YouTube channels. Earlier this year, we have made significant improvements when it comes to the depth of data we provide for individual YouTube videos.

Today we are excited to lift YouTube Analytics to the next level, covering most channel metrics available in YouTube Studio. We are proud to say we now cover both the channel and individual video-level in-depth.

What data becomes available?

We have completed the set of metrics and break-down dimensions offered by YouTube on channel-level, including:

• Historic subscriber counts (no 30 day-limitation for your own channels)
• Card metrics (learn more about cards on YouTube videos)
• YouTube Premium metrics (e.g., views coming from YouTube Premium members)
• Lifetime metrics (metrics aggregated since the creation of the YouTube channel)
• Break-down by age, gender, country, live or on-demand, channel subscribed status, YouTube product (e.g., YouTube Kids), playback location, traffic source, device type and operating system

Not to forget, for all these metrics, you can look into their development over time. In total, we have increased the number of available channel metrics from 12 to 114 with this release.

Why is this important for you?

By having access to many more metrics for your own YouTube channels, you can finally enhance your channel reports and tell a more complete story about how your brand or organization performs on YouTube. Breaking down metrics covering several dimensions adds a new level of depth and insights.

Playlist metrics coming soon

While this marks a major step towards a complete metric set for YouTube channels, we constantly improve existing data sets. Looking into the future, we can already share that YouTube playlist metrics are coming soon as well. We'll share this as a separate product update once available.

Setting the right time zone is important, so we can show all dates in quintly accordingly (e.g. when a post was published). So far setting the time zone was possible within the personal settings. Users told us it was sometimes unclear what time zone is being used when dates are shown. To improve this experience we have applied the following changes.

Asking for the time zone during onboarding and when adding new users

New customers will now be asked for the time zone to be used during onboarding. When adding new users to existing accounts, the admin will need to set the time zone when inviting a new user to their account. In all cases this ensures the time zone is set proactively in the very beginning.

Setting the time zone within the date selector

All date selectors now transparently share the time zone being used and easily allow to change it in the specific context. On dashboards you can even set different time zones for different metrics. This for example can help with setting a time zone based on the profiles selected.

Transparently sharing the time zone in several contexts

In several contexts where a date is shown in quintly, you will now see what time zone has been used. We always want to make sure you know exactly how to interpret the data in front of you. For metrics, you will find this contextual information right below the chart or table, including the date and its time zone.

Using our API is a common way to take the data you see in quintly into your own or third party applications. There are several parameters available to specify what data you would like to fetch.

Today we are introducing an easy way of building API requests. The Metric Builder now shows an API section within the Query results tab holding the complete API request for this metric and the current selection (profile, date and additional filters). In case you want to use the Metric Builder purely for building API requests, we recommend using the Api visualization in the top right.

Connecting the posts you see in the Tags section with metrics in Analysis has been a challenge so far. We are happy to introduce a link from the Tags to the Analysis section to close this gap. Simply look for the external link icon in the top right showing "Open in Analysis" on hover. It will take you to a metric that shows exactly what you have been seeing in the Tags section before. For that reason this metric is also a great starting point for building custom metrics.

Facebook has been rolling out the New Pages Experience recently, and quintly is now fully compatible with this update.

What is the New Pages Experience?

You can read the official article from Facebook here. It is a powerful update for Facebook Pages enabling public figures, businesses and others to manage their presence on Facebook in a better way. There are several changes, including a redesigned layout and better insights. Facebook announced it will migrate all Classic Pages to the New Pages Experience over the coming months.

What does it mean for you?

From the analytical point of view, the most significant change is the transition from Page Likes to Followers and removing the former. To incorporate these changes, we have adjusted the following data sources:

1. Data source "facebook": There is a new column "followers" beside "fans". Please note that "fans" holds still either the fan or the follower count, depending on whether the Page has already switched to the New Pages Experience.
2. Data source "profiles": There is a new column "hasTransitionedToNewFacebookPageExperience". This column can be used as a flag when building metrics in quintly.

Today we are excited to announce the availability of a new data source holding the comments on posts of your authenticated Instagram accounts. This data set enables completely new insights into the feedback of your users.

What information is available?

With this data source you have access to comments and their replies on posts of your authenticated Instagram accounts.

Instagram supports comment threads to better organize the discussion. Comments nested in a thread below another comment are called replies. Please note that there is no reply to a reply and nesting is limited at the second level. This data source holds both comments (first level) and replies (second level).

You have access to the following information per comment/reply:

• Publishing time: The date and time this comment/reply was published
• Post relationship: Identify the post this comment/reply belongs to
• Comment relationship: If this comment is a reply to another comment, you can identify the comment it belongs to
• Username: The username of the comment author
• Account answer: A flag indicating if this comment/reply was made by the author of the post this comment belongs to (helpful for customer care analysis and response time measurement)
• Text: The text of this comment
• Mentions: The @mentions within the text
• Hashtags: The hashtags within the text
• Hidden: A flag indicating if this comment/reply was hidden by the account owner of the post this comment belongs to
• Likes: The number of likes this comment/reply got

Please find the complete documentation in our data sources section in quintly.

Metrics

With this release we have created default metrics for you to start:

• Comments and Replies Table: See what users have commented and replied on the accounts' posts.
• Top Commentators: Identify the Instagram users who have commented and replied the most.
• Top Mentioned Users: Identify the Instagram users who have been mentioned in comments and replies the most.

You can expect additional default metrics to be available in Discover in the next few days.

Are there any limitations?

As of now this data source includes comments and replies made in an organic context only. Paid context commenting is something we will explore further for a future data source focusing on promoted posts and their comments and replies.

Account owners have several options to moderate the discussion. This includes blocking users from commenting and the ability to delete or hide individual comments and replies. Obviously comments that were deleted will not be returned in this data source. Hidden comments will be listed with the appropriate flag set.

By default LinkedIn replaces URLs in posts with their own shortened links if the original link exceeds 26 characters. Here is a screenshot of a post on LinkedIn showing a shortened link right before the hashtags are being listed:

To allow for powerful search using our post text filter, we are auto-replacing the LinkedIn short URL with the original URL in quintly:

As a result of this change all URLs - also those longer than 26 characters - will show the original URL in quintly. This allows for powerful filtering using our post text filter.