Geolocation is the process of identifying a specific place where your publication, photo or status come from. It is available on most social media applications, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. The goal is to identify in a geographic way where each content comes from. A vast majority of social media content is non-natively geolocated when is published. In recent years, social platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have become more privacy-focused and changed their APIs to improve the confidentiality of stored data. As a result, when content is published on social networks, the geolocation of the publication is not always systematically displayed.

This article will cover:

To provide our clients with geolocated data, we use geolocation inference depending on the platform, inference uses different metadata & methods and results in different precision rates.

Geolocation inference, what is it? Based on machine learning, our geolocation algorithms will use data from publications, such as time zone, language, description, account creation date. Which will assign geolocation to the author during the publication of the post.

Note: If no information is declared by the author, the geolocation cannot be determined.

Note: Depending on the platforms, the accuracy of the geolocation results may vary.

Users have the option of geolocating their publications themselves, but this functionality is rarely used. In addition, although the results are not always exact, it is possible to define the geolocation of a post through author’s profile. The geolocation data collected by the AI is the one with the highest accuracy, namely 87%.

Note: We only geolocate retweets from the same country as the original tweet. The Radarly tool qualifies retweets as engagement actions and not as independent publications. Indeed, what matters is where the post that generated engagement was published.

The language filter works by automatic language detection for publications that contain text.

This filter is more exhaustive than geolocation because most of the posts published will be qualified. If possible, try using the language filter accordingly.

💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.