Geofencing — Social Media Insights through a Lens

How Geofencing Saves Time and Resources

When you are researching social media activity, the massive amount of social media data is often overwhelming. Even when you are leveraging it to promote your brand or product, identifying the best social platforms to use and figuring out when and where to implement your marketing strategy can seem like a moving target. Billions of people use social media to regularly communicate and there is an ever-increasing list of possible social media networking sites. The more you can segment your target population, the faster and more accurate your results.

Geofencing is exactly what it appears to be — geo (location) and fence (border). Geofencing draws a virtual border around a specified location. This border does not have to be a certain shape or size but the smaller your fenced area, the more precise your results will be.

Geofencing Has Its Benefits:

1. More precise results: Geofencing is an efficient way to downsize your scope to a specific perimeter so you can visualize and focus on the high-value geospatial data that drives decisions and proactive responses. For organizations searching social media for brand management, asset protection or even marketing opportunities, geofencing establishes a virtual perimeter where any public social conversation within those boundaries is easily pinpointed.
2. Faster results: Imagine trying to find social media posts of a certain topic and using keywords across every major social media site from every possible user. There could be thousands of posts fitting those criteria needing to be evaluated for relevance. Sifting through those posts could take months and by then, the search would hardly be an accurate, timely representation. With geofencing, search results can be narrowed beyond just keywords, hashtags and handles. You can filter by city, neighborhood or even event location like a stadium. Within seconds, you have eliminated the 99 percent of irrelevant posts to focus your attention on the 1 percent of posts you really care about — those within the confines of that particular location.
3. Better data for better decisions: With highly-segmented data based on your exact specifications, you are armed with accurate, timely data you can use to make critical decisions. Instead of reacting, you can proactively respond, giving your organization a greater opportunity to succeed.

Snaptrends Geofencing

Snaptrends provides real-time and historical location-based social media posts inside a user-defined lens, which can be of any shape or size anywhere in the world. You can drop multiple lenses or a single lens in conjunction with social media outside of the lens. With Snaptrends’ proprietary algorithms and processes, you hear the full spectrum of the social conversation no matter where it takes place.

A polygon shaped geofence is used to isolate the exact physical location of interest

We define a lens as a type of geofence for a user-specified area. This means you can quickly and simply define exact boundaries within which you want to focus, whether it be a building, a neighborhood, a city or an entire continent. You decide where you want to look based on your social media data and internal research and draw the lines or input the address. Our geofencing lens will track every public, location-based social media post or those posts with the keywords you determine in that watchbox area. You’ll know what’s happening in real time with customized, automated alerts so nothing is missed. This allows you to view:

• All primary social networks and integrate data from alternate networks
• Social media posts, conversations and events in real time
• Public posts in a specific area based on location-based services
• Public posts using specific keywords, hashtags or user handles

Using Snaptrends, researchers and marketers can quickly and easily see what topics are trending in a particular area, who the key players are, who is in their social networks and how they are related to one another using graphical representations.