No doubt, Microsoft Power BI is an excellent, multipurpose business intelligence tool for making data-driven decisions. But did you know that it’s a smart solution for creating customized social media dashboards as well?
Power BI helps analyze, visualize, and share data of any kind. It delivers comprehensive insights to inform your strategies and measure outcomes.
You should leverage its robust features to keep track of and improve your social media performance.
All you have to do is feed it with reliable social media monitoring data of your brand, competitors, and industry.
In this article, we’ll show you step-by-step how to integrate your social media monitoring data — collected by Mentionlytics — into Power BI.
Table of Contents
Why you should integrate social media data into Power BI
You can integrate social media data into Power BI for plenty of reasons. We distinguish the two major ones.
To Create Custom Dashboards and Reports
A social media monitoring tool automates all the manual work of creating dashboards and reports for tracking your brand’s performance.
However, all tools — even Mentionlytics — visualize your data in standard charts and graphs to cover users’ needs. For tailored social media dashboards, you need advanced data visualization platforms, like Power BI.
With Power BI, you can combine data in different ways to create more specific dashboards, such as:
- Overall social media performance dashboard
- Social customer service dashboard
- Campaign performance dashboard
And more!
Using Power BI, you’re free to analyze and visualize social media data to draw conclusions and customize insights based on your needs.
To Blend Social Media Data into Other Business Reports
It’s no secret that social media monitoring data contains insights for various business areas. For instance, think about customer inquiries through tweets. Or testimonials on LinkedIn posts.
That means, this data is gold not only for social media reporting but also for other key business reports. By integrating it into Power BI, you can create info-rich dashboards for various stakeholders in your business.
Here are some examples of where social media monitoring data can be included:
- Competitor analysis dashboard
- Customer acquisition dashboard
- Lead generation dashboard
So, you can work miracles with social media data and Power BI.
Now, let’s cut to the chase and see how you can feed Power BI with all your social media monitoring data from Mentionlytics.
How to connect Power BI to Mentionlytics
Here’s what you have to do.
Step 1: Initialize Mentionlytics API
First, ensure you initialize your Mentionlytics API and retrieve your access token.
Once you have your access token, use it to access data from the Mentionlytics API, by making requests to a URL structured like this:
https://app.mentionlytics.com/api/mentions?token=xxxxxxxxx
For more complex queries, take a look at The Mentionlytics API documentation.
Step 2: Get your social media monitoring data into Power BI
In the home tab of Power BI click “Get data” to see all the available data sources.
Then, select “Web” from the available data sources so you get the data from the Mentionlytics API.
Now, in the pop-up window, enter the Mentionlytics API URL you want to get data from.
For example, we will use this URL and click OK: https://app.mentionlytics.com/api/mentions?token=xxxxxxxxx
To continue, a window will pop up with two columns. Click “List” in the first column.
This will open the list with the records. To be able to view the data properly, click “Convert To Table”.
And, then, click OK.
The only thing left is to expand the record properties by clicking the double arrow button shown in the image below.
In the options window that opens up, check the properties you want to keep.
Then, click OK. Now you can see the information you checked for each mention.
Finally, hit “Close and Apply” to load the data in the Power BI dashboard.
Step 3: Use your social media monitoring data in Power BI
In the Power BI dashboard, you can now see the data fetched from the Mentionlytics API in the data panel.
By clicking the arrow button you can see in detail what information this table contains.
Then, you can play around with data and create any kind of social media dashboard you want with customized charts, graphs, pies, tables, and more!
For example, with the data we imported with the example URL we used, you can create a line chart for your total mentions per day.
To do this, click the line chart icon to add the graph to the canvas.
In the X and Y axis of the line chart, drag ‘n’ drop the “pub_date” and the “total_count” info as shown in the image below.
Now you have a chart that displays the total mentions per day.
That way you’ll fetch data from the API, ensuring you have the latest.
You can also schedule to refresh data automatically throughout the day. Check out the Power BI Refresh Scheduling Documentation for more information.
That’s it! Now you’re ready to create awesome dashboards in Power BI with your social media monitoring data.
Access the Mentionlytics API
See? Integrating your social media monitoring data into Power BI is straightforward with our platform.
To use the Mentionlytics API, start your free trial now and contact our team to let you know of the process!
