A method monitors topical activity among networked devices of social communications networks. Related messages, such as posts, shares, likes, and others, are communicated between devices of the social networks. Each social network maintains a share count of related messages. A data network, such as the Internet, includes sources of articles. The method includes receiving a search item from the data network, collecting articles related to the search item from article sources, storing a unique identifier for each collected article, comparing the search item to the unique identifiers to determine similarity, compiling a result set of any similar unique identifiers, communicatively detecting, for the result set, respective share counts of related messages for each social network, and deriving a collective score based on all share counts. The score represents topical activity for the search item. The score is reported, and relevant articles may also be reported.