How Cops and Law Enforcement Agencies could benefit from Social Media Monitoring

Ever wonder if Steven Spielberg’s movie “Minority Report” could come true? If you could foresee a crime about to happen and use that knowledge to prevent it, our land could be so much safer today. Social media monitoring tools thus come as the harbinger of such technology that could help predict any anti social activity and alert authorities prior to its occurrence.

Here is a list of how social media monitoring could help cops take a more proactive role in abolishing crime and make the above dream come true

#1 Focus on Keywords for clear search results

With over 1 billion social media users talking about various people, topics or events, it is difficult to pick any substantial details from that random collection. Thus it is important to set major keywords around important places, people or events of significance to denote any major happening around them. So you get notified if anybody mentions the above or if any discussion takes place around those, track them on a regular basis and monitor any activity around them.

#2 Check for Unusual Patterns to track important activities

The flow of traffic on social media usually has a fixed pattern. The average number of conversations, number of individual replies per topic or the cumulative sentiments over all discussions shows a similar nature on a daily basis. As and when this pattern gets disturbed, it implies that something monumental has either happened or about to take place. Searching for such irregularities in social network behaviour could provide an insight into the under goings of a lot of activities and help take efficient measures for them.

#3 Drill down to identify source of issues

Have you ever heard of “If your head is on fire and your feet are in ice, then on an average you are Fine”? All large numbers work in a similar fashion. Thus maintaining atomicity of data is very important to check each layer of public sentiment, a particular group activity or a collection of correlated conversations to figure out repercussions or sentiments of public.

#4 Form tag groups to segment or identify outliers

On any social platform, lists or groups help you combine people with similar interests in one place and follow their activity easily. Using tag groups you can formulate sub groups with similar keywords like violence, death, crime, theft, etc. and correlate them with other important keyword sets containing names of people or places to find if any unusual conversation is taking place around a particular person or if someone has posted a violent message. You can track various kinds of conversations using a few sets of keywords and easily spot any irregular message that could be put on an alert signal.

#5 Monitor top influencer’s activity to check direction of public sentiment

Public is very fickle minded and some people take advantage of this fact to manipulate them. There are many public personalities who have large following. These influencers form a niche segment who can drive social behavioural patterns as per their will. Therefore, it is very important to track such influencer’s activities and what they say very closely to gauge the public reaction in advance and be prepared for everything.