Social listening as an OSINT tool: 2025 guide for government

OSINT tools provide important insights for government and public sector agencies. They increase situational awareness and provide a cost-effective method of gathering large amounts of intelligence.

In this post, we’ll look at how to use social listening tools to gather intelligence from real-time conversations happening across the web.

What is OSINT?

Before we dive in, let’s nail down an OSINT meaning. OSINT (open source intelligence) is the process of gathering information from public sources. Then, you analyze it to understand and predict trends, global events, shifts in public opinion, and potential threats.

OSINT can be used for good or for evil. For instance, information security professionals can use open-source intelligence tools to identify and address vulnerabilities. On the flip side, hackers and other bad actors can use the same tools to take advantage of those vulnerabilities.

In this post, we’ll talk about how governments and public sector agencies can use OSINT to do better work while preventing cyber attacks. We’re here to talk about ethical uses of OSINT. That means respecting privacy, protecting data, and complying with legal frameworks like GDPR.

Common OSINT sources

We all have digital footprints, and they’re often much larger than we realize. OSINT sources include all the places we (or organizations we deal with) share or store public information.

Common OSINT sources include:

• Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google – including regular Google search and “Google dorks”
• Social media
• Discussion boards and forums
• Blogs
• Company and agency web pages
• Cached info in repositories like the Internet Archive Wayback Machine)
• Online comments
• News media (print, TV, radio, newswires)
• Online images and videos (including reverse image search)
• Public data records (government records, business registrations)
• Metadata and geolocation information
• WHOIS, domain name, dns, and ip address search tools
• Review sites
• The dark web

How can government agencies benefit from OSINT techniques?

Public sentiment analysis

It’s important for government agencies to understand how people feel about the work they do. It’s even more important to identify shifts in public sentiment that could be the first sign of a new risk or opportunity.

In particular, managing negative shifts in public sentiment early helps prevent escalation. This is an important way to strengthen your agency’s reputation. Meanwhile, positive shifts in public sentiment can inform strategic planning. They help you gauge popular opinion and focus on the most effective initiatives.

Disaster response

OSINT tools provide a wealth of real-time recon data. They help you see what’s happening on the ground in the event of a crisis, natural disaster, law enforcement situation, or other major event.

OSINT provides situational updates from the very people your agency is trying to serve. Monitoring volume and sentiment of conversations helps you prioritize responses. You do this by tracking specific topics and keywords across a wide net of OSINT data sources

Rumors can fly during a crisis. OSINT also helps make sure you’re aware of misinformation as it arises so you can take steps to keep people safe.

Handling misinformation

Of course, a crisis isn’t the only time that misinformation (and disinformation) can be a problem. During a crisis, you can use OSINT tools for active misinformation identification.

When things are operating at a status quo level, you can set OSINT tools up for more passive misinformation identification. Create custom alerts using relevant keywords and topics in combination with sentiment analysis. You’ll then know right away when a new rumor or disinformation campaign emerges.

Information Security

Government agencies are responsible for a lot of sensitive information at both state and personal levels. It’s critical for IT teams and security researchers to use OSINT tools for penetration testing. For example, they can look for vulnerabilities in your:

• online properties
• source code
• social media accounts
• subdomains
• IoT devices
• and other attack surfaces.

Web-based OSINT tools also reveal potential vulnerabilities to phishing, malware, or other scams. For example, is too much of your employees’ information publicly accessible? Is it easy to find their email addresses and phone numbers on social media sites like LinkedIn?

Are employees creating vulnerabilities by sharing online about the projects they’re working on? Or revealing information about the agency’s security systems?

Identifying these risks can help you take steps to improve security on your website. They can also inform your security and social media guidelines for employees.

Finally, they help you spot new threats, scams, and cyber security weaknesses as they arise.

How to use social listening as an OSINT tool

Social listening is one of the easiest OSINT tools to set up, since it requires no IT or cybersecurity expertise. This is one of the reasons why 70% of government organizations are already using social listening tools.

Here’s how to set up social listening for OSINT using Hootsuite Social Listening and Talkwalker.

Monitor relevant keywords and topics

The first step here is to choose which keywords and topics to monitor. Start with the name of your department or agency, the names of key leaders, and your areas of service provision.

It’s okay to start with a small list. Once you put your social listening plan in place, you’ll start to see connections among topics and keywords in your custom word cloud.

As you see how topics and keywords connect, you can add more terms to your social listening plan.

Then, you can start to understand where the conversations about these topics are happening online. You’ll spot peaks and trends in conversation activity over time.

You’ll also be able to see which accounts are most popular in your topic coverage areas. You can keep an eye on the conversations that are reaching the most people.

To get the most OSINT from your social listening program, you need a tool with extensive source coverage. Hootsuite Listening crawls 150 million+ websites and 30+ social media networks in 187 languages. That’s the most of any social listening tool. In addition to written text, it can gather information from images, logos, symbols, videos, and podcasts.

Analyze sentiment

Using social listening to collect social sentiment data is sometimes known as opinion mining. This is a valuable form of OSINT, especially for threat intelligence.

Shifts in public opinion can signal new threats or opportunities. Quick Search in Hootsuite Listening helps you understand key sentiment metrics. You can answer important questions like:

• Are more people talking about you this week?
• What’s the tone and feeling of their posts?
• How are people talking about you and your areas of responsibility?
• What are the most popular positive and negative posts about?
• Which other conversations are you showing up in?

Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying. It uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.

For a deeper dive on how to understand what people think and feel by analyzing social data sets, read our blog post on how to monitor social sentiment.

Set up alerts

With Hootsuite Listening, you can set up real-time alerts. You’ll know right away when there’s a spike in mentions of your agency or a significant change in sentiment. It’s your early warning system to help you spot a potential crisis before it happens.

You can also schedule regular reports to keep your OSINT activities running smoothly in the background for timely review.

Predict scenarios and threats

So far we’ve mostly talked about understanding what’s happening in real time. But your OSINT framework also helps predict emerging situations that may need a response within the next 30 to 90 days. After all, the point of intelligence gathering is to understand what’s on the horizon.

Hootsuite Listening uses Blue Silk AI to summarize complex information, detect peaks, and predict trends. When you see potential events coming, you can plan your response and take corrective action in advance.

Practical tips for collecting OSINT with social listening

Understand (and follow) privacy regulations

Yes, OSINT involves working with publicly available sources. That does not mean you can use the information to do whatever you want.

It’s important to use trusted OSINT tools. They need to meet the standards required of agencies in your sector. Free OSINT tools may be okay for hackers, but they are not the best choice for most reputable actors.

Hootsuite is FedRAMP authorized. It meets FCA, IIROC, SEC, PCI, AMF, and MiFID II requirements. It’s already in use by more than 2,000 government and public sector agencies, including the majority of U.S. Department of Defense Combatant Commands.

Hootsuite also has a comprehensive set of information security policies based on the ISO/IEC 27001/27002 information security standards, Trust Service Criteria (SOC 2), NIST 800-53, and GDPR. Hootsuite only interacts with social networks through application programming interface (API) calls.

For more information on compliance with privacy regulations and social media platforms, read our blog post on compliance for regulated industries.

Review your goals regularly

As we’ve already said, OSINT can deliver a staggering amount of data. For your social listening efforts to be effective, you have to understand exactly what you’re trying to do.

It’s okay to acknowledge at the start that you may not know exactly what your goals are until you see what’s possible.

For government and public sector agencies, you’ll likely want to establish some goals around public sentiment. You’ll first need to establish some benchmarks. Then, aim to keep sentiment within a certain level, or set goals for improvement.

If you have some tough policies or programs to announce, you may need to adjust those goals. The important thing is to review your strategy regularly to ensure you’re not getting distracted by the volume of data available.

For detailed guidance, see our blog post on how to build a social listening strategy.

Have a response plan

Odds are, your information gathering will at some point help you spot a crisis in the making. Position yourself to act before things get out of control by having a response plan in place before you actually need it.

You’ve likely already got disaster response plans in place. You just need to review them and make some adaptations to incorporate information gathering through social listening.

If you have not already done so, make plans for how you will incorporate social media posts into your disaster response.

This is of course a best practice for reaching the largest number of people. But from an OSINT perspective, it’s important because it allows you to track public response to your messaging in near real time. You can then make adjustments on the fly if something is not landing as it should.

For more details, see our post on how to manage a crisis using social media.

Action your insights

Once you start gathering OSINT, you may find yourself overwhelmed with data. It can be difficult to understand how to take action on everything you’ve learned.

Hootsuite Listening allows you to cut through that noise with conversation clusters, Quick Search, and summaries based on machine learning. You can distill millions of conversations into curated, easy-to-understand reports with graphic data visualizations. You also have access to personalized OSINT dashboards that are easy to download and share with stakeholders.

These help you find the most critical information first so you can make informed decisions and take action faster. You can create custom versions with selected data points for briefings and strategic planning sessions.

All of this detailed analysis not only helps you predict and respond to crises and threats. It also helps you understand public attitudes that can guide policy and other legislative changes. When you act, you know you are doing so in the best interests of the people you serve.

Track data across millions of online sources, reduce risk, and analyze information faster than ever with Hootsuite Listening powered by Talkwalker.

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