Why are the number of posts for Twitter / X different in Listen?

If you compare social media data from Pulse and Listen, you may find differences in the amount of posts and engagements in regards to Twitter / X. This is due to the way Listen handles re-tweets, which differs fundamentally from Pulse.

 

In Pulse, both an original post and it's subsequent re-tweets, would be handled as separate posts. In Listen however, re-tweets are presented as engagement data connected to the original post (number of shares). So one post with 20 re-tweets would result in 21 separate posts in Pulse, whereas in Listen it would only be presented as one post with 20 shares in the engagement data. 

Usually this results in far less posts for Twitter / X in summaries or analyses, compared to data taken from the old Pulse-platform. This is important to keep in mind if you are presented with new data on Twitter posts that originates from Listen.

 

The number of re-tweets for each post in the platform is refreshed every time an update to the post is made by Listen, which occurs several times within a number of days after a post has been collected.

This is done to reduce clutter and data usage in your Listen searches, while still presenting the relevant engagement data as numbers instead of near-identical posts.