More than 50% of people in the UK use social media every week, so it is an important source of information for policy makers. It can feed our policy understanding by building our knowledge and helping us to make informed decisions. It is often also used for communication campaigns.
With 500 million tweets a day, there is a huge amount of openly available material on social media. In addition, you can also monitor blogs and online media. There are many free and paid-for tools that can help you make sense of this content and separate the signal from the noise.
You can use some of the tools listed below even if your department does not allow you to have a work Twitter account. If you are new to social media you can learn some of the basics in the GDS Social Media Playbook and also view guidelines on social media for civil servants.
Best practice examples
Civil servants and others are already using social media analysis successfully in the following ways.
Listen
Most departments use tools or dashboards to monitor what is being said about their policies on social media and online news sites. Here is an example of one on postgraduate loans by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. You can see how to set one up yourself in the tools section.
Find influencers
Social media tools are also regularly used to find the influential people who are talking about your policy area so that you can listen to what they are saying and also connect with them. For example the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) used social media to engage local people with the NATO summit.
Monitor real-time events
Real time analysis of social media responses to events or policy releases brings a deeper understanding of the situation on the ground and can also help to predict problems. For example the FCO uses social media analysis tools to monitor fast moving events in Libya and Iran.
Build a community
Monitoring tools can assist you to build an online community to find evidence and build a campaign around your project. For example BIS used social media analysis tools to reach new audiences for a review of the Sharing Economy.
Help customers
Monitoring tools allow departments to respond to citizens’ questions and complaints swiftly: read how the Government Digital Service does this.
Do social research
Government departments and think tanks are also starting to use social media data as well as more conventional research to inform policy making. This work is in its early stages and we will add more information to the toolkit as it becomes available. You can hear how BIS and Ipsos Mori are experimenting with this approach or read more in the ‘how to’ section below.
Manage emergencies
Many departments use social media tools to monitor and provide advice to the public during emergencies. The Metropolitan police used Tweetdeck to manage social media during the riots in 2011. Read a detailed account of how they did this (it was written in 2012 so it is a little out of date but useful nevertheless).
When to use/not use social media listening and analysis
Use social media listening and analysis:
whenever you need to understand what the outside world is saying about your policy area: it is especially useful for gathering a wide range of public views quickly and cheaply
when you need a broad range of qualitative evidence about the impact of policies
when you want to gather information in real time and interact with the sources of that data
if you want access to a much broader range of research information
Don’t use social media listening and analysis:
if your target audience does not use social media – for example, few people in care homes are likely to be on Twitter so an ethnographic approach might work better in this case
Issues to be aware of:
social media is not representative so the views you are hearing are only of a certain section of the population at a certain time
rumours and false information can spread easily over social media: be a cynic and check it against what you know; don’t rely on facts from a single unknown source and if you’re not sure, refer to ‘reports’ of something, rather than stating it as a fact
most tools only sample a small section of the whole conversation on Twitter: this isn’t a problem if you’re looking at trends in large quantities of Twitter data but it is worth remembering that you’re not seeing every tweet
although social media data used for this kind of analysis is openly available and frequently used by the private sector, you should still be aware of ethical and privacy concerns about its use
tools that claim to do accurate sentiment analysis (assessing social media messages as positive or negative) are rarely accurate as computers are not good at recognising humour or sarcasm; check the results and if possible correct what the tool finds
How to do social media analysis
1. Set your objectives
Plan the overall objectives for your piece of work with your digital or communication teams. For example, you may want to:
understand how people are talking about your policy area
identify influencers and experts on a particular issue
find online conversations to join around a policy
build a community around your policy area
If you need to monitor historical social media data, check that the tool you have chosen will provide this. It may cost more depending on your department’s contract with the provider.
Each social media tool will only ever structure the data in different ways. It is up to you to interpret and challenge this data.
2. Work out what and who to monitor
By monitoring keywords, organisations and individuals, you can build a picture of what is being discussed on a particular policy, where conversations are taking place and what the major issues are for different audience groups.
Most monitoring tools will require a set of keywords or ‘queries’ which are used to pull in relevant results. You’ll need to spend some time thinking about these words to ensure that your monitoring is as thorough as possible. Start by exploring:
key terms and #hashtags: policy name, relevant country, related words
major events related to the policy
journalists, bloggers, tweeters, news agencies
international organisations
senior political figures and parties
campaign groups and NGOs
public commentators and activists
Use the language your audience would use about your policy area - including slang or colloquialisms.
Top tip: use Boolean searching to make your query more precise.
Remember that keyword development is an ongoing process. At the start, it is likely that you will retrieve a large number of irrelevant results. Don’t worry. Review all the data and regularly adapt your search to get the best results. Most good monitoring tools will allow you to factor in keywords that you want to ignore.
3. Identify and understand influencers
Digital monitoring can help you identify the important (online and offline) influencers for your policy area, and understand their viewpoints. You should consider their ability to affect your policy area in the real world and change people’s behaviour. Use your common sense. Eg if Liam Payne, singer from ‘One Direction’, tweets jokingly about Ebola, should this be considered a major moment and Liam a key stakeholder?
In some cases, ‘real world’ influence may be closely related to online influence; in others, those who are particularly active online may become the new influencers, as happened in Libya in 2011 when previously unknown activists who mobilised the public online subsequently entered the new government.
The simplest way to start is by looking at people you know are influential and seeing who they are connected with. This could be by looking at following lists on Twitter or who they link to from their blog. Finding the right conversations is vital. Different countries or interest groups favour different forums for discussion: look beyond Facebook or Twitter to blogs, forums or country-specific sites. Once you’ve found the conversations, you can see who is leading them, and what the themes are.
There are many ways to measure online influence, including tools such as Klout or Kred. But these tools tend to be rather generic so you should consider the following questions when looking for influencers:
(a) Reach:
total number of their social media followers
blog traffic (this is sometimes hard to find but if the blog carries advertising, this may be a sign of good traffic numbers)
number of blog subscribers
number of forum members
(b) Resonance:
how often do they publish material?
how many people share that material on social media?
how many people comment on their blog posts?
(c) Relevance:
how much authority they have on the subject – are they an expert or directly connected to the policy area?
do their messages create a response from a high number of people both directly, and indirectly through retweets, quotes etc?
are they well connected to other influencers in the same field?
Keep an open mind to new commentators or views you hadn’t previously heard.
You can find influencers by simply searching Twitter or blogs and there are analysis tools which can help you.
4. Check and adjust
Use your offline knowledge of the policy area to check that what are you seeing online makes sense. Ask yourself if:
the information you have gathered is reliable and comes from credible sources – even if a reliable source is posting something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is accurate
the accounts you have identified are genuine: Twitter and Facebook verify some official accounts (look for the blue tick) and social media news organisations such as Storyful also verify social media
5. Consider how to use the information you are gathering
Depending on your objectives, you could:
feed the information gathered into policy formulation and plans – for example, external perceptions of a policy activity may influence what you decide to do next, or you may have uncovered new issues/views that should be factored in
identify individuals you want to engage with, invite to an event or follow on a medium-term basis
use your knowledge to develop your digital and wider comms activity – for example, by identifying conversations to join in with, hashtags to use, issues to clarify or rebut and ways to interact with particular audiences
6. Social media analysis as social research
A number of departments including the Cabinet Office, the Go-Science team from the Department of Business Innovation and Skills and think tanks such as Demos and Ipsos-Mori are exploring the potential of using social media analysis in social research. This work is at an early stage and you should always use social media analysis with more statistically rigorous data such as polling when making policy.
Projects that are starting to experiment with these techniques include Demos and Sussex University’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. They have published an excellent summary of the pros and cons of this kind of analysis and their most recent case studies. View an example of their work. We will update the toolkit with more information on this in the next few months.
Tools
Please check with your department’s press or digital teams to see what your department is already using and for guidance
Tool
Cost
Time
Simple digital listening dashboard
£0
½ hour to set up
Basic social media monitoring tools
0-£100 a month
½ hour to set up but needs regular monitoring
Social media analysis tools for larger amounts of data
£100-£3000 a month
3 hours to set up with regular monitoring
Simple digital listening dashboards
Dashboards are a good way of monitoring multiple streams of social media and news data about a particular topic or to monitor your own social media accounts.
Dashboards come in varying degrees of complexity and a range of prices, but you can use some of the ones below for free. Simple instructions on how to set up your own dashboard are below. These are all tools which government has used before: listing them does not imply endorsement and we are keen to hear your thoughts on tools via the feedback form.
Basic monitoring
Netvibes is a simple free dashboard you can use and share with your colleagues – here are some tips from BIS on how to set it up and also how to use Twitter lists
Hootsuite is a social media management system that allows you to monitor multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard and is free to sign up. To use Hootsuite in a crisis, we recommend adding streams to monitor based on:
the key words and profiles identified in your initial research
imported Twitter lists, eg journalists based in the country or political commentators
addicto-o-matic dashboard tips
Addict-o-matic creates custom pages showing buzz on any topic – the video above shows social media expert David Brigg’s tips on how to create an Addict-o-matic dashboard
Other useful sites for news monitoring:
BBC Monitoring (login required) – this provides in-depth monitoring on country media trends, key political websites, blogs and social media
Google alerts allows you to set up alerts by topic
Storyful helps discover, verify and distribute the most valuable content on social media platforms
Try it out in 5 minutes:
follow the BIS guidance to set up a Netvibes dashboard
refine your keyword searching
share the dashboard with your colleagues and team
Simple social media monitoring tools
There are a large number of tools for monitoring and analysing social and digital media. We have mentioned some below which are regularly used by government, but this does not imply an endorsement of any particular tool. These tools also change frequently so if you know of any other tools we should include, please get in touch via the feedback form below.
Many of these tools can be used for free. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed: you don’t need to use them all. The most effective way to build up a picture of the latest developments is usually to use one or two main tools well, combined with social media and wider internet searches.
Basic monitoring of your own channels
The easiest way to monitor your own social media activity is to use the tools provided by the application itself. You can access reports on your own Twitter account and Google analytics can give you a detailed assessment of how audiences are using your blog or webpage. Read a guide on how to use Google analytics.
Analysing trends and reach
Social Mention and Topsy offer social media search and analysis
Trendsmap shows real-time local Twitter trends
Tweetreach can track the progress of a twitter handle or hashtag
Statweestics offers a range of statistics on Twitter
Tracking influencers and key voices
Buzzsumo helps you find influencers
Electionista tracks a list of key influencers for specific countries or themes
you can see who key people follow in order to find influencers and connections between groups by using Twiangulate
Crowdvoice tracks voices of protest by curating and contextualising data
Keyhole is a freemium tool which helps you to see which influencers are using a particular hashtag
Klout is one of several tools which provides data on an individual or organisation’s digital influence
some very popular accounts have fake followers which are automated Twitter accounts rather than real people; you can check to see if someone’s follower count is really as good as it seems using Fake Follower Check
analyse someone’s followers or who they follow with Followerwonk
Try it out in 5 minutes:
start finding influencers in your policy area by trying out a tool like Buzzsumo or Keyhole: sign up for free and put in the key words for your policy using Boolean search terms
repeat and tweak your terms until you get the content you need
Large scale social media data analysis tools
Some departments have contracts to use more complex tools to analyse large amounts of social media and online media data. It’s worth talking to your digital comms team about these tools if you want to do complex analytical work, or if you’re likely to be monitoring a large event or topic – something for example like the Scottish elections which produced over 2 million tweets.
Many of these tools have similar capabilities:
they allow you to input multiple key words and also exclude certain words – they may let you do this using Boolean search terms
you can analyse the data in many different ways – looking for influencers, hashtags, key terms, sentiment, age and gender (although it’s worth noting that these last 3 measures are often not very accurate)
these tools use natural language processing, a technique where the software mimics the human brain’s ability to group certain words together and spot correlations between them; it’s still early days, so this technique isn’t always accurate – particularly if the language that people use to describe topics changes quickly
some of the tools use machine learning to allow you to train the tool to create more accurate results for you – you do this by checking whether it has categorised a particular tweet correctly and then correcting the tool’s assumptions. The tools should then recategorise all other tweets using the new rule you have given it
There are many of these tools on the market: this is a selection of those already being used by departments. This list does not imply an endorsement and we are always on the look out for new similar tools, so please do suggest other tools via the feedback link below.
Brandwatch
Coosto
Pulsar Trak
Crimson Hexagon
Ripjar
Radian6
Traackr
Try it out in 5 minutes:
ask your communications team which tools they use and if they can give you a demonstration
Tell us what you think
Send us feedback on what other information you would like to see on this page.
Go back to the toolfinder
Go back to the toolfinder page.