Blog > September 2010

With hours of experience in writing hit and miss queries behind him, Bryan, our COO and now expert query builder, gives you his guide on the most effective ways to track your brand through Brandwatch.

Social Media Monitoring: How to build a good query

Social Media Monitoring is bit like finding a needle in a haystack, or lots needles but in a big haystack. For most brands there are dozens or hundreds of interesting mentions every day, but the problem is that they are hidden among thousands of less interesting or completely irrelevant mentions. Defining the query properly, with Boolean words like AND, NOT, OR etc., can reduce this problem so that it feels more like looking for needles in a mere handful of hay (apologies for stretching this metaphor uncomfortably far).

Why do I need a complicated query, simple works with google?

Simple is good, and wherever possible I write a simple query (see Golden rule no.1 , below). That said a simple search on Google often gives the user thousands of irrelevant results, only we mostly don’t notice as the Google ranking algorithm means the top 10 results, i.e., the ones we see, are usually good enough.

So, for example, I might be trying to find reviews of the best apple juice and so I type “Best Apple Juice” in Google (without the quotation marks – I’ve added those to fit with editorial convention). I have not bothered to use any sophisticated Boolean terms like AND, NOT, etc. Google then tells me it has found over 53m web pages and shows me links to the 10 most relevant ones. Several of these 10 are interesting.

But what about the other 53 million sites: are they all about the best apple juice? Well for starters, the 50 million is dubious (see Giles’ blog about this here), but if I were to look more closely at some of the search results after the first page, I would find that Google have included pages that are about just Apples (e.g., recipes with apples, tips on growing apples, etc), about all sorts of best things and about all sorts of juice. These don’t appear on the first page because Google is clever enough to rank the pages that include all 3 terms before any pages that include only 1 or 2 of the main terms (‘best’, ‘apple’ and ‘juice’).

Because social media monitoring is about looking at all the relevant pages about a brand or topic, we have to be more precise and that means writing a more complicated query, involving ANDs, ORs, NOTs and other Boolean Operators.

For the full post, click here.

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