Introduction
Our Insight team uses social listening as a key tool for research, for example, to understand how visitors view Scotland as a destination. At its simplest, social listening is about being aware of what visitors are saying about a business or area online.
It is not limited to the mainstream social channels such as Twitter and Instagram but also includes articles and comments made on blogs and forums, as well as articles on news sites and review sites.
This methodology gathers first-hand insights about what visitors and potential visitors are looking for - their interests and expectations, their experiences and feedback - as well as allowing us to spot trends in the industry.
For the purpose of this analysis, we gathered online conversations using the following criteria:
- conversations in the first person
- conversations about visiting Scotland or travelling to Scotland
- analysis of conversations (within this context) that included topic themes such as “where to stay’’, ‘things to do” or “how to get there”
- data is gathered from public-facing sites such as Twitter. Retweets have been excluded to focus on unique conversations
- mentions from news sites have been excluded to focus on visitors’ conversations
- Facebook is not included as a source of data due to its private nature
