TRAC: Engagements

An engagement on TRAC is a reaction to a post, for example a repost, a share, a reply or a comment, and this varies depending on the platform or data source.

Before we delve into the types of engagements we collect, firstly we need to distinguish how we view and store these engagements on TRAC.

The first type of engagement data in TRAC refers to engagements that are stored as actual pieces of content. This means you can perform a full-text search on these items within your results. Examples of this type include reposts, replies, and comments. In TRAC, reposts and comments are treated as distinct types of posts. As such, when calculating the total volume of data collected in your search (and its changes over time), these engagements are included in your overall mention volume.

In other words: Total Volume of Mentions = Posts + Engagements

Where:

This ensures that TRAC captures a complete picture of the conversation, accounting for both original posts and the interactions that amplify them.
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The second type of engagement data in TRAC refers to numerical engagements, i.e. metrics that represent counts rather than actual content you can view or read. These include figures such as the number of shares, number of comments, or number of likes. Because these are simply numerical values (and not physical pieces of content, like posts or comments), they are stored as counts rather than as content objects.

As a result, these engagement counts are not included in the total data volume collected in your search. This means they will not appear in the Key Numbers charts or the Overview Mentions graph.

This behavior is intentional and relates to how Pulsar indexes different types of data. Including metrics like comment_count, like_count, and share_count in your total data volume would significantly inflate the dataset; leading to inaccurate representations of your actual content volume and data usage.

We collect reposts, replies, and no. of likes. However, as noted above, the number of likes is stored separately and not summed up to the total engagements in the Key Numbers chart or the Timeline charts. Only reposts and replies are factored into this metric, and therefore will count towards the overall volume of data collected in a search.

Note:

In a Facebook Page Panel search, we collect the following:

As noted previously, the no. of likes and the no.of comments are indexed separately, and not summed up to the total engagements in the Key Numbers chart, or the Timeline charts. Only the actual comments are factored into the volume metric, and therefore count towards the overall volume of data collected in a search.

In a Facebook Topic search, the Facebook engagements we collect are the no. of likes. And if available, we also collect the number of comments. We are unable to collect the actual comments. And as mentioned previously, the no.of likes are not factored into the Key Numbers chart or the Timeline charts, and therefore are not counted towards the overall volume of data collected in your search.

Engagements on these channels are the no.of social shares that the article has received on Facebook. In other words, this is the number of times the article URL has been shared on Facebook. For Reviews, we also also get the Review rating that has been left by users on the site. And similar to the no. of likes and no. of comments, the no. of social shares is not counted towards your overall volume of mentions.

Following Instagram API changes, we only collect the no. of likes and the no. of comments, not the actual comments that a post has received. So, for Instagram, as previously explained at the beginning, when looking at the total engagements from Instagram in the Key Numbers chart, this will always show 0, unless you switch to the Results view, as shown below, where you will be able to see the like count and comment count for each post.

The only exception to this rule is if you are using the TRAC functionality which allows you to collect tagged mentions of your brand. This is a common practice on Instagram, where a user tags your business or brand in a photo or video. In this case we are able to collect the actual comments, in addition to the no.of comments and no. of likes.

For Discord, engagements are only collected on Thread type posts. Otherwise, all comments are considered posts in their own right.
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Threads are a unique type of conversation on discord that collect all replies within a singular grouping rather than in-line with the rest of conversation as most of discord functions. It's not an incredibly common conversational tool within discord servers but it depends on the server!