Posts by Jeff Doak

Social media listening tools today simply do not accurately report author location, even though they often say they do. Here’s why.

When you look at your social media dashboard — or listening tool, or river of news — most of the data you see in your tool was gathered or created in one of the two following ways:

But location data is different. In most tools, the physical location of the author is actually determined through a hybrid of the above approaches, as follows:

1. Website registration information: The tool might determine the location where the site is registered through a reverse lookup of the site’s registration information. Such an approach is not reliable when the property is registered to one entity and authored by another — or authored by several others, in the case of a group blog. Further, the vast majority of social media conversations occur within social networking domains and platforms, rather than on blogs registered to individual users.
2. Top-level domain: The domain “extension” that can indicate the country of registration, for example: “.ca” in Canada. First, many of the flaws in the above bullet also apply to this technique. In addition, a forum is hosted on a Canadian domain certainly will not restrict participation to Canadians only; even if they did, there is a vast difference between an author in Quebec and author in the northern reaches of the Yukon Territory.

As a result, automated author location analysis is not very reliable.