Velocity is the speed at which conversations happen around a specific topic. It looks at the rate at which data has been collected in your search, per hour, giving you an additional lens to understand the scale of the conversation, not only in its totality, but spread over a period of time. The metric is accompanied with a previous time period comparison, so you can understand if velocity is trending upwards or downwards, which can be either a good thing, or a bad thing.

You can find out the Velocity of a search by heading to the Key Performance Metrics in the Snapshot Overview.

You can also see this metric in All Searches, which is the first page you see when you log into TRAC. From here you can sort for Velocity hourly, this week, or this month, and depending on the time frame selected, you can get the velocity per minute, per hour, or per day.

Velocity is a useful metric because it allows you to see how the conversation has been trending over hour-long periods and compare that to previous timeframes. Unlike Total Volume, or Volume Over Time, Velocity helps you understand the rate or speed at which the conversation is taking place, and depending on your media monitoring or social listening goals, this can be a positive thing, or can be a negative thing - negative in the sense that an increase in public discourse around a particular subject can be a bad outcome for a brand or a client. So in a crisis monitoring situation, for example, you might prefer a velocity that's trending downwards, instead of upwards, whilst with the launch of a new product on the other hand, a velocity that's trending upwards could be a positive indicator of the success of your product launch.