Beyond Brand Research: Unlocking Political Insights with Social Listening Tools
Social listening tools are often seen as marketing and communications platforms — designed to track brand awareness, sentiment, and campaign performance. They collect and analyse vast amounts of public online discourse across social media, blogs, forums, and news sites, helping organisations understand what audiences are saying, when, and why it matters.
But the potential of social listening goes far beyond marketing. With the right setup, these tools can uncover insights into political conversations, policy debates, and public opinion trends — all in real time. This makes them an invaluable asset for teams working in reputation management, risk intelligence, and open-source intelligence (OSINT).
In this article, we’ll explore how social listening can be applied to political analysis, using a real-world example, and how KINSHIP Digital helps organisations implement and manage these tools to extract deeper value from social data.
Getting Started: Defining Your Search Parameters
The internet is an endless source of information, and social media alone generates millions of posts every minute. To make sense of it, you need to start with clear objectives:
What do you want to identify?
Which platforms or sources are relevant?
How will you turn unstructured data into actionable insights?
For this demonstration, let’s look at online conversations surrounding the Australia–Papua New Guinea Defence Treaty; also known as the Pukpuk Treaty.
Instead of manually scanning thousands of posts, social listening tools allow us to run a quick search that surfaces relevant mentions across multiple channels in seconds. Like Google, these platforms use keywords, but they go further — identifying every instance of those terms across posts, comments, articles, and news coverage.
2. Using Boolean Operators to Refine Social Listening Searches
One of the most powerful aspects of social listening is the ability to use Boolean search operators to refine results.
For example:
The “OR” operator tells the system to include results containing either phrase. If you only want posts that mention both, you’d use “AND” instead.
You can also apply filters to narrow your dataset, such as “Country: AU” to capture only Australian-origin conversations. This ensures your insights are relevant and focused, reducing unnecessary data noise.
Boolean operators are essential for anyone using AI-powered social listening, helping turn massive data pools into precise, topic-driven intelligence.
3. Analysing Results: Sentiment, Reach, and Real-Time Insights
In our example, the search retrieved over 3,000 mentions in 30 days, reaching approximately 77 million people.
Sentiment analysis (a core feature of social listening) revealed that 71% of posts expressed negative sentiment, suggesting strong public concern or criticism.
Conversation spikes aligned with key events:
17 September: when the treaty failed to be signed.
2 October: when the agreement was finalised.
These temporal patterns demonstrate how social listening can deliver real-time intelligence, showing how audiences react as events unfold. Analysts can then drill deeper, viewing individual posts, filtering by platform (e.g. Facebook or X), and identifying the most influential users or narratives.
4. Beyond Marketing: Social Listening as a Strategic Intelligence Tool
This demonstration only scratches the surface. Social listening tools can be applied to:
Public policy and political monitoring
Crisis management and misinformation detection
Person of Interest (POI) Monitoring
Real-time narrative and signal detection
Visual and text-based trend mapping
With the right configuration, these platforms become a strategic intelligence asset, helping decision-makers move from reactive to proactive operations.
5. How KINSHIP Digital Helps Organisations Harness Social Listening
At KINSHIP Digital, we help organisations unlock the full potential of social listening, from implementation to configuration, management, and analysis.
Whether your goal is to monitor emerging issues, measure public sentiment, or build a long-term social intelligence capability, our consultants provide hands-on expertise across leading enterprise platforms such as Sprinklr.
Our managed services ensure your investment delivers continuous value — with optimised dashboards, automated reporting, and insights aligned to your organisation’s strategic goals.
If you’re ready to turn social data into actionable intelligence, connect with KINSHIP Digital today.
Contact our team to learn how we can help you implement and manage social listening tools that align to your remit.