Communities is Meltwater's new audience discovery tool. Communities is currently in Beta, and we want to update and improve its capabilities with your input and feedback!
What is Meltwater Communities?
Communities is an audience discovery tool that separates Twitter authors into meaningful segments. While Explore helps you identify what is being said, Communities allows you to go further to understand who is saying it. This is called community analysis, which allows you to understand, assess, and take action on the insights you draw from the members of your community.
Communities allow you to look at the individual authors and add either whole communities, subcommunities, or individuals, to a new or existing authors list to use with new Explore searches for alerts, dashboards, digests, etc. It finds the influential Twitter authors whose tweets match your query and provides insights into their demographics and their interests.
How is the Data Collected?
Communities uses Linkfluences author's database to return information about each community (Linkfluence is a separate Meltwater product). Each influential Twitter author has a variety of attributes assigned to them, that we then use to aggregate the overall analytics in Communities. These attributes include demographics (ex. age, gender, location), and interests (ex. topics, professions). Influential Twitter authors are defined as those with over 250 followers.
Linkfluence extracts and infers this information by looking at the authors' Twitter bios and recent tweets.
How do I Create a Community Report?
So how do you actually run a community report? In one of two ways.
Via the Navigation
Click on Communities in the left-hand navigation. This will open the Communities landing page where users will see a list of existing Community reports along with the ability to create a new report.
This will open the Communities landing page where you will see a list of all existing Community reports, along with the ability to create a new report.
Click Create report to start a new community report. Enter a name for this report, select a saved search, and select a date range to generate your Community report
In Explore
In Explore, after you run a search, open the Authors tab. At the top you will find a banner that reads Find and understand relevant Twitter communities and authors. Create Community Report.
Click Create Community Report. Enter a name for this report, select a saved search, and select a date range to generate your Community report
To view the results of your newly created community report, or any previously saved community reports, click on the name of the Community report in the table.
How do I Read the Community Report?
The Communities Report consists of three tabs: Overview, Communities, and Authors.
Overview
The Overview tab displays high-level metrics pertaining to the makeup of your community. Metrics include:
Author community map - Groups influential authors (greater than 250 followers) into top-level and sub-level communities. Hover and click to drill in.
Total authors - the total number of influential authors in the report
Community relevance rank - ranking of author communities and sub-communities based on their relevance to your results.
Top authors - top authors based on follower count
Top topics - the most common topics identified in tweets and bios of community authors
Demographic overview - breakdown of the most common demographic groups of the community
Bio keywords - the most frequent terms and hashtags in author bios
Age/gender - breakdown of ages and genders of authors
Use the Communities Filter at the top to update the results, drilling into specific communities and sub-communities. Changing your selection here will update the subsequent results in the report.
Communities
This tab displays each community at a high level for easy overview, exploration, and segmentation.
Use the Communities Filter at the top to update the results, drilling into specific communities and sub-communities. Changing your selection here will update the subsequent communities shown in the tab.
From each community, you can add the list of all authors to an existing or new author list by clicking the silhouette in the top right-hand corner.
At the bottom of each community, is a button to View Community Authors. Click this to open the Authors tab.
Authors
The Authors tab displays each individual author of the select community or sub-community. Authors are ranked by authority score.
Use the Communities Filter at the top to update the results, drilling into specific communities and sub-communities. Changing your selection here will update the subsequent authors shown in the tab.
Each author card will display the name, handle name, bio, followers, following, and tweets count, as well as authority score. This allows you to see the individual people that make up the select community or sub-community.
Use the checkbox on each author card to select and add authors to a new or existing author list.
FAQs
Are there any limits to the number of community reports that can be generated?
No, there aren't currently any limits.
How long does a Community report take to generate?
They typically generate in less than one minute but depending on the size and frequency of your reports, they may take a little longer.
Can I generate a shareable dashboard or export data to CSV from Communities?
Yes! For a shareable dashboard, all eight widgets from the Overview tab are included. A CSV download option is also been included for the Communities and Authors tabs.
Where do the topics and professions information come from?
The Linkfluence data model infers these insights from the content of the Twitter author bios and tweets from the individual authors.
Are authors limited to a single interest area?
No, authors may fall under multiple interests.
Can I filter results and interact with the graphs and charts?
Currently, you can't filter within Communities, nor can you click on widgets to update results (we will be working on these features in the future). However, you can definitely add filters to the original saved search, the results of which will be used to generate the communities.
Do the results stay the same when I generate a community?
No, the community is dynamic. This means that if you reopen the community report on a different day, we will refresh the data, so new community members may be added and some may be removed.
How many community members do we analyze at one time?
We analyze up to 100,000 community members from your search, based on the ones with the most followers.
How many community members can we add to an author list at one time?
The limit is currently 500 members, however, we are planning to increase that limit soon.
Team Meltwater