Case Study: Queensland University of Technology achieves large-scale social media and streaming analytics with Google Cloud Platform

Queensland University of Technology Digital Observatory Studying social media, music, and streaming behavior

Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Observatory brings together projects that track public communication and content consumption across social platforms and streaming services. Faced with fast‑growing, heterogeneous datasets and a need for long‑term, institution‑wide analysis (from Twitter activity to radio, Spotify and streaming catalogs), the team required a scalable, cost‑effective analytics warehouse to unify data, support research and enable reporting for academics, industry and government partners.

The Observatory uses Google BigQuery as its analytics backbone, ingesting data from the Twitter API and industry sources and linking to visualization tools. This setup stores 2.4 billion tweets (adding about 1.3 million per day), identified roughly 500,000 meaningfully active accounts out of 3.7 million Australian accounts, and has powered analyses of crisis communication, news‑sharing patterns, music consumption, bot networks and collaborations with government and industry—while enabling public dashboards and ongoing research.

Queensland University of Technology

Axel Bruns

Creative Industries Faculty