A new model to quantify the impact of a topic in a location over time with Social Media

•A method to quantify the impact of a topic over time in a location is proposed.•We adopt the Recency, Frequency and Monetary model to ease the application.•We introduce the concept of Social Media Engagement and Exposure to a topic.•Our system harvests and processes geo-located Twitter to create the impact metrics.•For the evaluation, we discussed the application to different real-world topics.

Social Media can be used as a thermometer to measure how society perceives different news and topics. With the advent of mobile devices, users can interact with Social Media platforms anytime/anywhere, increasing the proportion of geo-located Social Media interactions and opening new doors to localized insights. This article suggests a new method built upon the industry standard Recency, Frequency and Monetary model to quantify the impact of a topic on a defined geographical location during a given period of time. We model each component with a set of metrics analyzing how users in the location actively engage with the topic and how they are exposed to the interactions in their Social Media network related to the topic. Our method implements a full fledged information extraction system consuming geo-localized Social Media interactions and generating on a regular basis the impact quantification metrics. To validate our approach, we analyze its performance in two real-world cases using geo-located tweets.