A word about 'social listening'
Our Insight team uses ‘social listening’ as a tool for research. Gathering data on specific topics from online conversations, to allow us to capture first-hand insight from visitors and potential visitors to Scotland. Understanding their interests and expectations, and their experiences and feedback, on topics such as ‘where to stay’, ‘what to do’ and ‘how to get there’. This helps us to see how Scotland is viewed as a destination and to spot tourism trends too.
We use public-facing sites, such as Twitter and Instagram, as well as articles and comments in blogs, forums and review sites, to gather our social listening data. We don’t use Facebook, as it’s a private platform, and since we’re looking for unique visitor conversations, we also exclude news sites and retweets. If you’d like more information on social listening and how we use it, check out our guide to social listening.
As the chart above shows, the main source for social listening data for this report was social media at 95% (54% Twitter and 41% Instagram). Forums provided 3% while review sites such as TripAdvisor provided 1% as did Tumblr. 
Our social listening reveals that the main conversations about events and concerts take place on Twitter, while conversations about festivals take place predominantly on Instagram. The most talked about events were Hogmanay (31 December) in Stromness, the Orkney Nature Festival (11 – 20 May 2019) and the Orkney Storytelling Festival (24 – 27 October). 
