Social (Media) Listening is a term most frequently used in marketing to denote a process through which one can identify what is being said about a certain brand, product, service or topic. Marketing agencies and companies used it to acquire competitor intelligence, see how the public perceives their new product and follow the latest industry trends.

Broadly speaking, by following certain keywords, they weave a net to “catch” the conversations happening online that pertain to the specific area of interest. The statements in these conversations are then analysed using algorithms that determine sentiment, and the data is gathered to show how consumers/users are influenced by their marketing efforts.

Next time you post about a good or bad experience you had using, for example, a streaming service, chances are that your opinion will be registered in their database.

In the field of social sciences, social listening can show researchers how the public perceives new policies or, as is case for AI, recent technological developments that would need to be regulated.

Within the framework of popAI project, both social listening and social media listening were conducted. The first activity looks into the web, crawling and recording blogs, publications, research papers and everything else but social media. The second one complements the previous, by targeting exclusively social media and, in popAI specifically, Twitter.

Click the boxes below to find out more information about how the activities have been conducted and their main results!