Query

In the context of social media, a person enters a word, phrase, or question into a search bar, tool, or platform to return specific results or insights. These results typically involve posts, profiles, hashtags, topics, or data that are relevant to the user's intent. Searches lay the groundwork, to the extent that they go, for analytics on social media platforms.

People use searches not because they are going to be seen but because they are going to be heard, with the hope of finding some specific content, conversation, or user of interest to them. The advantage for them in using this tool is that social media queries do not take a lot of time to employ, nor do they require a high degree of complexity for them to be effective. Businesses, as a subcategory of people, are equally if not more vested in the use of queries because they hope to understand the general behavior of the population at large and also specific segments of it.

They hope to use that understanding to better serve the populace with specific products or services that almost always require a higher degree of engagement than, say, watching television or reading a newspaper. Queries are platforms for the kinds of conversations that the operators and the audience hope to have. Such conversations can help us better understand what our audience wants in order to find useful products and services across these platforms, which in turn allow us, as users, to better interact with them.