Forums as a Listening source

Updated 

By adding Forums as a Listening Source, you can listen to and learn from forums data.

Sprinklr supports Forums as one of its various Listening Sources. Forums, or message boards, are online discussion sites where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. The Internet forums communities have converged around hundreds of topics ranging from medicine to technology and vacations to hobbies, etc.

Sprinklr supports millions of forums and message boards across varieties of topics, including top forums like Adobe, Ubuntu, Boards.4 channel, Jeuxvideo Forums, and various Community Groups, etc.

Forums source capabilities

  • Source: Forums

  • Source of data: Data vendors

  • Coverage: Content coverage from millions of forums & message boards across dozens of industries including automotive, beauty/healthcare, consumer electronics, gaming, and parenting.

  • Latency: Depends on Forum Sites: Less than 24 hrs from time of publication.

  • Historical data: Q2 2015 (depends on source verification of forums)

  • Backfill support: Yes, for a new source from the date of addition, for an existing source all the data that has been fetched.

  • Engagement Stats Refresh Rate: Not updated

  • Author/ Profile metadata details: Yes (Author Name & Profile Picture)

    Note: Author URL is not consumed for Web Sources, hence distinct users cannot be determined accurately.

  • AI-enriched data: Sentiment, Emotions, Language, Word cloud, Topic Cluster, Gender (profile), Smart Themes Clustering, Smart Insights

  • Message type: Forums

  • Media type: Blog, Status, News, Photo, Answer, Link, Question

Forums data entities in Social Listening

Data Entities

Type

Description

Domain

Dimension

The top level domain name of a message's website of origin.

Domain Authority

Metric

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking.

Distinct Domains

Metric

Distinct domains count from which mentions coming in

Distinct Users

Metric

Distinct users count from which mentions coming in

Moz Rank

Metric

Moz Rank of the domain of this message source. Moz Rank will be in the range of 0 to 10.

Moz External Links

Metric

Moz External Links gives the number of external links to the domain of the source website of the message.

Moz Spam Score

Metric

Moz Spam Score is a metric that indicates how likely a website is to be penalized by the search engines as a site that provides low value to searchers, as measured by the ratios of content to code, content to external links, external links to internal links, and several other factors. The Spam Score will be in the range of 0 to 18. Higher Spam Score implies higher spam content.

Alexa Page Views

Metric

Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. Note that the pageviews are not unique.

Note: As per the new calculation logic updates we have made in the Alexa Page View metrics, you will get the exact values sent by the Alexa team as is without any modifications.

  • Applicable Sources – Web Sources only

Alexa Rank

Metric

A relative measure of global popularity based on unique visitor and pageviews metrics from the past 3 months. Note that Country ranks are similar but are based on metrics for a specific country from the past 1 month.

Alexa Reach

Metric

Alexa Reach is an Alexa Web Search metric that measures the number of people who have the Alexa toolbar or extension installed and who see your content. For example, if your website has a Reach Score of 5,000, this means that 5,000 people out of a sample of 1 million, who have the toolbar or extension installed, saw your site yesterday. Alexa Reach should not be used/compared in conjunction with other metrics as the logic for calculation is totally different.

Note: As per the new calculation logic updates we have made in the Alexa Reach metric, you will get the exact values sent by the Alexa team as is without any modifications.

  • Applicable Sources: Web Sources only

Threads

Dimension

Link to the associated message thread from the web source

To fetch data from Forums

Query-based Topic

  • In order to fetch data from Forums, you need to create a Topic with Forums as its source.

  • While creating or editing your topic, click the Apply Filters tab, and select Forums as one of the Web Sources.

  • You can also select Source: Forums from the dashboard/widget filter.

To learn in detail about how to create a Topic, read Create a Topic in Topic Creation UI.

Domain-based Topic

  • In order to fetch data from Forums, you need to create a Domain-based Topic with Forums as its source.

  • You can add the domains/domain list in the Setup Profile tab of Topic builder.

  • While creating or editing your topic, click the Apply Filters tab, and select Forums as one of the Social Channels.

  • You can also select Source: Forums from the dashboard/widget filter.

To Backfill data from Forums

  • Once the topic is created/ updated, you can backfill the topic going far back to Quarter 2 of 2015.

  • To know more about how to backfill data, check out Listening Backfill for Topics.

Limitations

  • 100% coverage should not be expected for source verified Forums as well.

  • Crawlers do not have the ability to paginate and crawl "historic data" data, therefore misses in forum comments/ threads are possible.

  • It is suggested to provide multiple subsections of the Forum site during Source Verification.

  • Backfill is available only from the date of addition of a newly added Forum.

  • If the client has a Lithium community associated, it is suggested to authenticate their forum accounts to improve the listening coverage.

Frequently asked questions

Yes, as provided by data vendors/ domains.

The Forums data stay in Sprinklr Environment as long as no intimation is provided by the Forum source sites.

Reach metric is not supported for Forums as we do not get follower count due to API limitation. Only Media Reach is supported for Forums.

Yes, backfill is available only from the date of addition. Historical data for Forums are not available for non-source-verified product Forum URLs. Also if a new forum is added by source verification process the data will be from an ongoing basis.

Engagement stats are not updated for Forums.

Forums are pulled based on keyword match and domain based listening.

Yes, Sprinklr can pull Forums from an entire URL-specific Forum page.

You can use Quick Search and in the search bar enter url: link and can check directly if any mentions are in the environment or not.

Here are the steps you are advised to take: 

  • Source verify all the Forum URLs you want to listen to if they are not already present in Sprinklr repository.

  • Once the URLs are source verified, domain based listening could be used to fetch data on a going forward basis in Listening.