Using Radian6 to Monitor Local Social Media Sentiment On Poverty

I used the social listening tool Radian6 to scan local mentions for a specific keyword: poverty. This tool uses publicly available data on social media to gather buzzwords or trending topics about that keyword that I chose. Here are the results I got (30-day data; the bigger the word, the more the mentions):
Social Media Mentions About Poverty
The main takeaway here is that there are a lot of people that mention words pertaining to religion or spirituality when talking about poverty. A great deal of this is also Catholic in nature as the Pope's official Twitter account is mentioned several times. This is very reflective of Filipinos being 80% Catholic (source).

Official Twitter Account of the Pope: @Pontifex

It is noteworthy that religious keywords are way more prominent than keywords such as education or entrepreneurship. Words such as policy, governance, or infrastructure do not even make the buzz.

I'm not saying it's wrong but it does make me a bit worried that we think more about church or spirituality when engaging in conversations about poverty.

Also, I wonder what kind of trends will appear in other countries, especially those who are not as impoverished as us. I wonder what kind of campaigns we can push to shift conversations and extract solutions from these data.

During one of my classes for the Certified Digital Marketing Program, NiƱa Terol talked about how they used Radian6 and other social listening tools to get insights for the campaigns of Senator Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan. Politicians are already taking advantage of these technologies.

It is a double-edged sword, I know, but looking at the glass half-full makes me imagine the many potential uses of social listening for government and civil society.

Emerging technologies are always very exciting. We just have to make sure that these are used in the interest of a free and prosperous society.

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