Unknown and Unidentified Profiles in Listening Analytics
Collecting listening mentions is always subject to the privacy policy of the social platforms. Technical limitations are put in place to protect users, influencing the way we collect and analyze listening data.
One of the effects is that sometimes it’s impossible to display some profile information or even identify a profile.
Subsequently, this influences the information we show in the charts and how we calculate some of the metrics.
Users who opt-out from sharing personal data become Unknown profiles in some of the Analytics charts
You might come across an unknown profile in your Influencers or Advocates chart. This means the user chose not to share information about their profile.
In such a case, we don’t display the name and profile picture—you would see a placeholder image. Yet, we’re still able to identify the profile’s ID.
As long as we have the profile’s ID, we can connect a listening mention to its author and include it in the metrics.
That’s why the metrics Number of authors, Influencers, and Advocates remains unaffected. We’re still able to:
Include the profile in the metric Number of authors that informs about the number of profiles that mentioned a brand.
Find out the number of followers a profile has. That's why you can find Unknown profiles on the Influencers list.
Learn how many times a specific profile mentioned a brand so that you can find Unknown profiles among your Advocates list.
Profiles we can’t identify don’t count in the metrics
When we can’t identify a profile (technically speaking, we can’t get its ID), it’s impossible to connect a listening mention and its author.
It's possible that in Content and Community, you can still find the listening mentions by unidentified authors. Yet, they aren’t taken into account in some metrics you’d find in Analytics. As long as we cannot connect a mention with a specific profile, the metrics could be misleading. Thus, the unidentified profiles aren’t included in Top Authors table, nor the Number of authors metric.
When we can’t identify a profile, when showing the content in Content and Community, instead of a profile’s name, we display an Unknown profile.
The reasons why we can’t identify a profile and get its ID could be the following:
The profile was deleted.
An Instagram profile has been switched to private.
A Facebook user has disabled the sharing possibilities after we fetched the post.
A listening mention was detected thanks to the Instagram hashtag search.
Emplifi data package can help to identify profiles and include them in the metrics
We can identify profiles that have been previously added to our database. We call it Emplifi Data Package (for details, see Listening - Data Sources Available & Coverage).
The Emplifi data package would mostly affect the listening mentions coming via the Instagram hashtag search (see Listening - Instagram Hashtag Search). For the majority of the content, we wouldn’t be able to identify the profile’s ID. Yet, if it’s in our data package, we can connect a listening mention to a specific profile. We can then both show profile information and include it in the metrics.