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TRAC: Visibility

This article will help you better understand more about visibility as a metric on TRAC.

Updated this week

Learning Outcomes

  • You will learn what Visibility is.

  • You will understand how you can use it to further your analysis of the topics you are tracking.


What is Visibility?

Visibility is a proprietary metric combining impressions or media reach, engagements and social shares, channel type and content type, to measure the impact of a piece of content. We assign this score to every post, across all channels, and we calculate this metric by taking into account the following:

  1. The format of the post - i.e. whether it's a post or a reply, contains an image, contains a link or it's just text.

  2. The channel the post is published on. The type of channel influences the longevity and lifecycle of a piece of content, (e.g. tweets have a half life that's shorter than a news article or a blog post).

  3. The size of the audience of the author, e.g. number of X Followers, Average Facebook Page Likes, Alexa ranking for News, Blogs, Forums and Review sites.

  4. The engagement generated by the post, i.e. the volume of reactions a post has generated, e.g. retweets, comments or Facebook social shares for News articles, Blogs and Forums.

Once the score has been assigned to every single post, we then aggregate them by author to estimate the influence level of the user. The reason why we apply the Visibility score at post level first, and not directly at author level is that people are influential about specific subjects and not across all the subjects they talk about. An influencer score that's simply applied to the individual without taking into account their content would be misleading because it would lead to assume that the individual is influential about everything they talk about. So, by applying the Visibility score at post level first, we can accurately identify influencers by topic and therefore provide a much more granular and accurate view of your influencer network.

Visibility, like Social Impressions, is calculated in real-time, then updated twice: 6 hours and then 12 hours after the content has been posted. This is because it depends on engagement, so after 12 hours we are able to gather a realistic assessment of the scores, taking into account as many reactions as possible.

Where do we display Visibility on TRAC?

Visibility can be found in different sections on TRAC, where each view of the metric is telling you a story about what content has had the most impact, which sites and outlets have the highest visibility, and which influencers micro or macro, have the biggest impact when discussing specific topics.


Key Performance Metrics

This looks at the average visibility of the posts you've collected over time and helps you assess whether the topic you're looking at and the content you've collect in relation to that topic has a high impact with your audience.


Content Over Time

Visibility within the context of Content Over Time allows you to measure the impact of your conversation across different data sources over time. In the example below, you can see that there was a peak in visibility on 15 January 2023.


Top Data Sources

This chart breaks down the visibility of posts from each data source, within the selected time frame. So you can measure if for example the content is more impactful on X or Facebook.


Top Content

This visual gives you some insight on the most impactful posts within the conversation. In this example, you can see that online news content is dominant and tends to have the highest visibility as compared to content from other data sources.


Most Active Time & Day of the Week

This chart enables you to see the time of day and day of the week when a specific audience's content has significant impact.


Influential Voices or Top Contributors

Use this list to understand more who is making the largest impact on your conversation.


Top Sites & Outlets

You can also use visibility to see which sites and outlets have the highest visibility.

πŸ“ˆ Example: In the list above there are some recognisable sites such as mumsnet.com and Pinterest that rank high in terms of Visibility.


Sentiment Over Time

This looks at the visibility of posts that have a positive, negative or neutral sentiment. You can use this chart to understand how impactful are the posts that are negative or positive. And if brand sentiment is one of your KPIs, you definitely wanna keep an eye on this, and you'd want to see less red and more green when looking at this chart!


Emotion Over Time

This chart helps you understand the visibility of posts that have any of the following emotions: joy, anger, sadness, disgust and fear, within the selected time frame. Similar to Sentiment this chart can be used to measure the impact of content that is positive leaning, versus the impact of content that is negative.


Misinformation Over Time

Misinformation Over Time is an incredibly useful visual for gaining insight on how news in particular is impacting on the conversation you're analysing. For example, you can see that the below visual displays a consistently high visibility score for credible news sites. This would immediately suggest that misinformation is not having a significant impact on the online conversation you have based your search on.


We hope you enjoyed reading this article! πŸ“š

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team via live chat. πŸš€

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