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Let’s take a dive into the engagingWith: operator…

 

Firstly, let’s get some context:

  • author: captures posts by a person
  • engagingWith: captures replies and shares of posts by a person

You can use engagingWith:rihanna to measure engagement as people respond to (or retweet) a post from the account, even if they don’t mention the word rihanna in the post. Mentions will be indexed when people have replied or Retweeted a post from the specified account. 

  • For Twitter, engagingWith: only looks at the immediate parent, so it will not pull all replies where there is a large tree of replies and sub-replies.
  • For Reddit we have engagingWithUrl: which is always the root post of the comment chain, e.g. all comments and nested comments within comments will be found with the engagingWithUrl: operator querying the url of the original post.

engagementType: is a refinement which you can add on, for example if you only wanted comments and quotes, not retweets, you could do engagingWith:rihanna NOT engagementType:RETWEET

Remember you can also use the “mention type” filter on a channel to assist you without using certain strings of code. 

engagingWithGuid: allows you to index a specific Tweet/post. The ID can be found in the Tweet/post URL as mentioned above. The Tweet ID and Facebook post ID can be found at the end of the URL while viewing the Tweet/post. So if you take this Tweet https://twitter.com/Brandwatch/status/1600143276362944512

E.g., engagingWithGuid:1600143276362944512

  • Neither the engagingWith: or engagingWithGuid: operators will pick up replies to replies.
  • engagingWith: or engagingWithGuid: operators do capture tweets that are only images or only @ mentions
  • For Reddit, we use the operators parentPostId and rootPostId instead of engagingWithGuid

To summarise so far:

engagingWith:rihanna will match all comments/quotes/retweets relating to any post originated by rihanna. If you only want that for some posts, you would have to use the engagingWithGuid: operator instead, and list the tweet IDs that you want. What we can't easily do, is support matching all comments/quotes/retweets where the parent post contains a hashtag etc.

Let’s say you just want to index just comments on your owned Instagram account, use:  channelId:123456789132456789 AND site:instagram.com AND engagingWith:rihanna AND engagementType:COMMENT

Or Youtube: site:youtube.com AND (author:X OR engagingWith:X)

Maybe you’d like to isolate all the Retweets of your owned content. Use: engagingWith:rihanna AND engagementType:(RETWEET OR QUOTE)

 

Got any more tips to add to this?

What operator do you want us to explore next? 

Check out our Wildcard deep dive...

 

➡️ See more posts in the Boolean Explained series here.

Thank you for this!

Would it be possible to know how to accurately pull quoted tweets when using a query that uses the engagingWithGUID operator?

 

At one point I would sort post by “original post” and this surfaced data, more recently using the “reweet” content type as a filter has resulted in the same outcome. Guidance would be appreciated!

Is the engagingwith operator only useful for Twitter or will it also look into other social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIN?

Hey @John Chaparro I  am thinking along these lines….

 

 engagingWithGuid: AND engagementType:QUOTE


engagementType: is a refinement, for example if you only wanted comments and quotes, not retweets, you could do engagingWith:brandowner NOT engagementType:RETWEET

Let me know how you get on

Hey @Rachel 

I’d be curious to test Tiktok in the way that I described the Instagram solution above. Let us know if you do this and if so, how you get on?

LinkedIn - their API is more restrictive 

Facebook - this should work as it does with Twitter

A couple of things to be aware of:

  • With Facebook, we might not have author information for some FB data, due to limitations of what Facebook's API provides. I.e. it probably won't be as consistent and comprehensive as Twitter.
  • If the FB handle is different from TW, to avoid your query potentially pull the both social handles from the same social networks you’d need to couple the engagingWith operator with a site operator.

Hi (again) @Rachel

Final answer on LinkedIn - it does even appear to have engagingWith set, on comments. The only catch is that posts by the page owner also have engagingWith set, to themselves, so if a client only wants comments and not original posts, they'd have to do engagingWith:pepsi NOT author:pepsi

Thanks for your responses @Ian Ferguson! I will give these a try and share the results with you. 

Hi @Ian Ferguson

I have a question, does the engagementWith operator work to collect comments from a YouTube channel?

Currently, to collect comments on videos within Youtube, we have to register the link of the posts within the Query

Hi @Ian Ferguson

I have a question, does the engagementWith operator work to collect comments from a YouTube channel?

Currently, to collect comments on videos within Youtube, we have to register the link of the posts within the Query

 

I’ve put the question to a few folks but I am 95% sure for a channel, it’s not currently possible. From a video to video basis, I am wondering if we could take the same approach as Reddit and use engagingWithUrl:

 

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