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Yes, there are countless number of social media tools but none were able to give me just the answer to:
1. how many threads on "topic a"
2. how many original posts on topic a?
3. how many responses on topic a?

Perhaps Radian6 can give me these metrics but I used other tools and it did not. It gives me an arbitrary score but it means nothing outside that tool. Does anyone know of any tool that can easily gives these metrics?

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A quick, practical supplement to the thread: raised a clear set of counts (threads, original posts, replies) and the community correctly pointed out two paths — commercial monitors and small custom tools (, ). The core idea is simple: treat a “thread” as a conversation-id/permalink, treat the root message as the original post, and treat everything else in that conversation as replies. Once your data is organized that way you can report the three numbers unambiguously.

A minimal workflow you can apply to any data source:

  • ingest raw posts with their metadata (author_id, created_at, thread_id or reply_to);
  • normalize text (lowercase, strip punctuation, apply synonyms/stemming);
  • mark roots where reply_to IS NULL (or is_root = true);
  • run three aggregations: distinct thread_id containing the topic, count of root posts matching the topic, count of non-root posts matching the topic. Example SQL (adapt to your schema):
SELECT
  COUNT(DISTINCT thread_id) AS threads_with_topic,
  SUM(CASE WHEN is_root=1 AND text LIKE '%topicA%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS original_posts,
  SUM(CASE WHEN is_root=0 AND text LIKE '%topicA%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS replies
FROM posts
WHERE text LIKE '%topicA%';

Practical cautions and tips: tune your boolean/phrase query to avoid false positives (use quotes, OR groups, and negative terms), dedupe cross-posts, exclude obvious bots, and decide whether “mention in a reply” should count toward thread inclusion. If you need historical coverage or a GUI, modern commercial platforms provide thread-level views and query builders; if you want repeatable, auditable counts build a small pipeline using a search index (for example, Elasticsearch) and lightweight aggregation. (brandwatch.com)

This approach preserves the simplicity you want while giving defensible, reproducible numbers — which is what people were really trying to find in this thread.

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Member Avatar for MktgRob

Sadly, simplicity is viewed as valueless. Software manufacturers build products with more bells and whistles than anyone really uses. The only simple tools I have seen were the ones that were homemade by good programmers who have gotten fed up with what is available.

But we can dream and hope for a simple tool, can't we?

Member Avatar for lebrun

Yes, Radian6 can provide those metrics. You can measure:
- number of original posts which mention topic A
- number of replies (responses) which mention topic A
- the total number of threads where topic A is mentioned (whether the mention is in the original post or in the reply).
- Also, for each original post where topic A is mentioned, the system also displays a total Forum Thread Size (giving you a sense of the size of each thread where topic A is mentioned). You can also sort all content by this metric (displaying the largest threads first, etc.)
- you can also get a Unique Source count, counting sources where there are posts or replies containing topic A

If you need more info or what to take a look at how to do this, please give us a call (see: http://www.radian6.com ) or contact us at

I hope this helps with your question. Cheers!

Yes, there are countless number of social media tools but none were able to give me just the answer to:
1. how many threads on "topic a"
2. how many original posts on topic a?
3. how many responses on topic a?

Perhaps Radian6 can give me these metrics but I used other tools and it did not. It gives me an arbitrary score but it means nothing outside that tool. Does anyone know of any tool that can easily gives these metrics?

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

You know what, after I must have checked out at least 2 dozen social media monitoring tools, Radian6 might be the best thing out there afterall....

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