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Import from Facebook
You can import posts and comments from Facebook Page or Group walls that you have collected with NCapture.
What do you want to do?
- Overview
- Import from Facebook
- How can I use Facebook in my research?
- Understand how posts are imported as datasets
Overview
Facebook posts and comments can be captured and imported into NVivo. Before you can import Facebook content into NVivo, you first need to have captured it with NCapture.
Your default view in Facebook is usually the News Feed which you can capture only as a PDF. Wall posts for a user can only be captured as a PDF.
If you display wall posts for a page or group, you can capture the content as a dataset. This becomes a dataset source in NVivo that you can auto code.
NCapture is a web browser extension that enables you to gather material from the web to import into NVivo for Mac. NCapture for Chrome is available from the Chrome web store.
For information about capturing content from Facebook, refer to the NCapture Help.
Import from Facebook
The steps below describe what happens when you import Facebook data that you captured as a dataset. If you captured Facebook posts as a PDF, then refer to Import web pages.
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On the Data tab, in the Import group, click NCapture.
The dialog opens displaying the default
(or previously selected) folder location and any NCapture files that are
stored at that location. If you want, you can import NCapture files from
a different location—click 
, and
then change the folder location.
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Select the capture files that you want to import. If you want to import all of the NCapture files in the current location that have not been previously imported into your project, click Select captures not previously imported.
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Click Import. The NCapture files are imported into the current folder location in your project.
NOTE If the Merge matching social media datasets (including previously imported) check box is selected, any matching Facebook datasets are merged together. Facebook datasets are considered to be matching if they contain wall posts for the same Page or Group. Matching datasets do not need to have the same Source Name. Refer to Approaches to analyzing Facebook data (Gather Facebook data over time) for more information.
How can I use Facebook in my research?
Here are some ideas for using Facebook in your research. You can:
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Join Facebook Groups that are relevant to your research.
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Analyze content across a number of Groups.
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Create your own Page or Group on Facebook and invite others to participate in conversations.
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Recruit volunteers to participate in online surveys.
Understand how posts are imported as datasets
You can import Facebook data as a new dataset or merge the data into an existing dataset based on the same page or group. If you have not previously imported similar Facebook data, or do not choose to merge matching social media datasets when you import the data, then a new dataset is created.
Information you provided at the time of capture is imported as follows:
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Your description becomes the description of the dataset
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Your memo becomes a memo linked to the dataset (when you merge matching datasets, memo content is merged too)
If you specified nodes at the time of capture, these nodes are created (unless they already exist) and the entire dataset is coded at these nodes. Refer to About coding (Coding entire sources to a node) for more information.
Any hyperlinks from the posts are retained in the source and you can click on a hyperlink to follow it. Some hyperlinks may not work—for example, if you do not have access to the hyperlink destination.
Photos that have been made public (for example, on a Page wall) are imported into NVivo as separate picture source files, and stored in a folder at the same location as the Facebook dataset. Thumbnails of the photos are also displayed in the Picture column of the dataset. You can click the thumbnail picture to open the related picture source. If you code a row containing a photo, the picture source is also coded.
The dataset is automatically classified with the source classification 'Reference'. Information (metadata)—for example, URL and Access Date—is stored as attribute values for the source.