What Is Social Heat? A Plain-English Explainer
TL;DR: Social Heat is a 0 to 100 score for how much attention an asset is getting right now relative to its own normal. It combines three measurable drivers, volume, velocity, and breadth, and is presented as awareness, not a forecast.
Social Heat is a 0 to 100 score for how much attention an asset is getting across social platforms, forums, and news, right now, relative to its own normal. A high score means a stock or coin is drawing unusually broad, fast-rising discussion. A low score means it is quiet. That is the whole idea in one sentence. The rest of this explainer covers exactly what goes into the number, because we built Social Heat specifically so you never have to take it on faith.
The problem it solves
Attention moves fast and lives everywhere. A ticker might be erupting on one forum, trickling across a few others, and showing up in a news wire, all at once. No human can track that across thousands of assets in real time. The instinct is to collapse it into a single number, and plenty of tools do exactly that. The catch is that most hand you the number and ask you to trust it, with no way to see what is inside.
We took the opposite approach. Social Heat is a single score, but a transparent one. You can always see why something is hot.
The three drivers at a glance
| Driver | What it captures | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | How much an asset is discussed relative to its baseline | The raw level. On its own it favours always-loud assets |
| Velocity | How fast that volume is changing | A move from quiet to busy carries more information than steady chatter |
| Breadth | How widely attention is spread across independent communities | The hardest dimension to fake. Broad attention is a stronger signal than concentrated noise |
What goes into the score
Social Heat is built from three measurable drivers. Reading them together is the point, because any one alone is misleading.
Volume is how much an asset is being discussed, measured against its own baseline rather than in raw counts. Ten mentions is a lot for a quiet small-cap and nothing for a mega-cap. Normalising against the asset's normal is what makes volume meaningful.
Velocity is how fast that volume is changing. A stock going from quiet to busy is far more interesting than one that is permanently loud. Velocity catches the shift, the moment attention starts accelerating, not just the steady-state level.
Breadth is how widely the attention is spread across different, independent communities. This is the one most tools ignore, and it might matter most. A ticker hammered inside one corner of one forum is a few loud voices. The same ticker appearing across many separate communities at once is attention genuinely broadening, which is much harder to fake.
Combine volume, velocity, and breadth, weighted and normalised the same way for every asset, and you get Social Heat.
Why we show the math
When we built this, we made a deliberate choice: no black box. Hover any asset and you see its volume, velocity, and breadth scores, the actual drivers behind the heat. If a stock is hot because of one viral post in a single community, you can see that. If it is hot because attention is broadening fast across many sources, you can see that too. Those are very different situations, and a single opaque number would hide the difference.
This is not a feature we bolted on. It is the principle. A score you cannot inspect is a score you cannot trust, and trust is the product.
What Social Heat does, and does not, tell you
Be clear on the limits, because this is where honest and dishonest scores part ways.
A high Social Heat means an asset is drawing unusual attention. It means something is happening and more eyes are on it than normal. That is real, useful context.
It does not mean the price will go up. It is not a buy signal. We have tested whether social attention predicts price, and the honest answer is that attention is informative as awareness, not as a forecast. Social Heat tells you where the market's focus is moving, before it necessarily shows up in price or mainstream coverage. What you do with that is your decision, alongside your own research.
We wrote about why attention beats sentiment as a measure in attention vs sentiment: why how much beats how positive, and the bigger picture in our guide to social sentiment and the stock market.
The bottom line
Social Heat is a transparent 0 to 100 measure of how much attention an asset is getting, built from volume, velocity, and breadth, normalised so it is comparable across stocks and crypto. It is designed to be inspected, not trusted blindly, and it is honest about its limits: it measures attention, not the future.
That is exactly what Orpail is built to do. If you want a clear, open view of where market attention is going, you can get early access here.
Orpail provides informational and educational data about publicly available social and news activity. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or digital asset, and not a prediction of price or performance. Social attention is one lens among many. Always do your own research.