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Social Media Monitoring: Why Google Alerts won’t cut it
Starting out with social media monitoring, most people begin with Google Alerts. However, if you’re serious about social media monitoring, you’ll want to shop around for a professional tool.
The problem with Google is that the search results are based on a variety of factors including your own search history. Obviously, if your search history is irrelevant to your new query, you’re unlikely to get any good data.
Also, Google’s secret algorithm determines the relevance and authority of links, which for monitoring purposes is inappropriate. For example, you’re likely to miss out on obscure, but relevant industry blogs, that don’t play by Google’s SEO rules…
Next, you’ll find it’s one thing to locate the information, but something completely different to get a grip of the data. How do you handle your social media monitoring search results? Not with Google alerts, that’s for sure.
So where to start?
First, define which social media platforms you’d like to pull information from. Where does your market segment hang out? Slumming around on My Space, Friend casting on Facebook, or Tweeting on Twitter?
Next, define your keywords. Say you’re a lawyer looking for new clients, you’d want to use some keywords describing your field of expertise. If he’s providing intellectual property (IP) services, he’d want to monitor anything related to “patents”, “trademarks” and “copyrights”. But he’d then get lots of noise from competitors marketing their IP services!
By simply adding additional keywords, such as “pirate”, “infringement” or “question” our IP expert would narrow in on individuals with a particular problem… That way, he’d reduce the number of search results dramatically, spend a lot less time going through irrelevant search results, and find those with a specific issue to resolve.
Depending on the answers to the above questions, you can either choose an agency to do the job for you, or try one of the do-it-yourself social media monitoring services.
Worst kept secret: Choosing the do-it-yourself option will save you big time!
If you want get down to business right here, right now, sign up for Imooty’s FREE 4 week social media monitoring trial!
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I agree, the Google search parameters will make you a halfway psycho if you try using it professionally. In addition to the factors you’re mentioning, you’ll have to deal with some pretty steep language-, and possibly your IP location issues too.
How do you deal with words such as “pirate”, won’t the IP lawer also have to deal with a lot of irrelevant information on ships around the Somali coast??
Good question, thanks for asking it. There are two solutions.
The quick and dirty solution is by filtering information with AND and NOT denominators. For example “pirates” have to be mentioned in connection with “music”, “software” and “computer” and exclude post with “somalia”, “ship” and “highjacked”.
A more sophisticated way is using one of our semantics components which categorize data according to a machine learning / user feedback process. This is a tailor made service and generally for larger clients that need to categorize large amounts of data. An ontology is then created manually and after the initial machine learning process, the AI categorize information according to a fulltext ‘meaning’ analysis.