What's important about volatile topics?
Social networks are become increasingly self-managed. As a result, it's increasingly difficult to view or read all content created by a community. Rather than depending upon manual, piecemeal, or other possibly flawed methods to retrieve samples for judging sentiment, Telligent Analytics' volatile topic capabilities provide an objective account of the topics pulsing throughout your community.
Volatile topics have a specific definition in use by Telligent Analytics: They are topics having a high change rate in occurrences or mentions within the community - perhaps experiencing a sharp or quick drop in usage, or a rapid and large upturn. A volatile topic is not a volume measure per se (i.e., one that receives the most mentions). It’s very common for a topic having the most mentions not to be listed as a volatile topic. Instead, volatility is a measure of changeability (i.e., usage greatly and/or quickly up or down).
As an example: A given company's flagship product name would probably be a very common and constant topic any given week, and thus would not be volatile. If, however, the company releases a new product or version, feedback about this event could bubble up in Telligent Analytics as a volatile topic.
Keep in mind that a dramatic drop for a topic could be negative or positive. If, for example, you see “Installation Failure” as a volatile topic that permanently and dramatically drops, it could indicate customers are not having as many or the same problems as they used to have.
In the screen capture below, the term "Product A" is experiencing a great deal of volatility: many acute mentions and many acute instances of negative sentiment.
Related information
Identify volatile topics