Social Listening Query Writing Competition 2025: Celebrating This Year’s Masterminds

Several months of strategic thinking, showing off social listening skills, and unleashing creative prowess. This is what the participants of our Social Listening Query Writing Competition 2025—the analysts, strategists, and researchers—were dealing with, and now we are ready to announce the winners! But first…

📝 What was the 2025 topic of the competition?

In April 2025, we challenged the participants globally to create their unique, voluminous Boolean queries using the YouScan platform based on a set brief. Thus, they competed across two categories — Brand and Agency. The task of the Social Listening Query Writing Competition 2025 was defined as follows:

• Research question: How are GLP-1 medications shaping out-of-home eating in the US?

• Data range: Last 12 months (April 2024 - April 2025)

• Geography: US

• Language: English 

• Non-geo-located platforms: Explain how you’ve approached data from sources without built-in location tagging

• AI use is allowed, but show your work and rationale clearly 

🏆 Welcome the winners!

Hélène Classine – Hélène is a Social Intelligence Manager at Groupe SEB, and she is the winner in the Brand category of the competition. 

Daniela Stevenson – Daniela is the Social Intelligence Analyst at Ralph. She is the winner in the Agency category.

👍 The judging criteria 

All queries created with YouScan were carefully judged under the following criteria:

✅ Relevancy rate: the percentage of comments returned by a query that match the research criteria

✅ Breadth: signal volume, weighted by relevancy

✅ Structure of the query: logical, readable, and well-constructed Boolean

✅ Logic behind the structure: written rationale explaining why a participant structured it the way they did

Kudos to everyone who participated in this year’s Social Listening Query Competition! The dedication you put into the competition is unmatched and is much appreciated. 

We also thank our partners, The Social Intelligence Lab and Listen + Learn Research, for stellar collaboration in organizing the competition and keen insight while assessing the queries.

Stay tuned for other exciting challenges and opportunities we’ll offer so that you can showcase your social listening skills down the road.