Some words about keywords in social media monitoring
SM2, like most of our competition, is driven by a keyword set-up you do when initiating a search. We provide a tabbed interface to help you define sets of keywords that will accurately drive your search results. These include keyword categories like Organization, Competitors, Products, People, etc. By using these categories when setting up your SM2 search you prepare the application so it can help you sort and analyze results. We also offer the ability to utilize negative phrases to eliminate undesired results- plus some advice on not using words that are too generic.
Most of us are familiar with the use of keywords in search optimization for web sites and in contextual ad campaigns like Google Adwords. These keywords are the phrases most commonly entered into search engines by people seeking information. Keywords for social media monitoring are a little different because we’re looking for things people refer to in conversations rather than search terms. ‘Buzzwords’ might be a better description.
I recently did an SM2 search on the subject of Al Gore and We Can Do It, his climate change awareness campaign. The only keywords I used were “Al Gore” and “We can do it” and wecandoit.org, their website. These were specific enough to return a lot of results, enough for me to see trends, identify sentiment (highly positive, BTW), get a good idea of geo-location, etc. Other ‘brands’ can require many more keywords, particularly when there are many competing brands, multiple markets, etc.
If you’re finding that you’re getting too few or too many relevant results you can clear your search and start over with a better set of keywords, perhaps removing generic terms or adding a few more specific phrases. And if you’re tracking someone with a common name like ‘Mike Johnson’ you may want to associate his name with something less common like the name of the company he works for. This creates a phrase that kills off getting a lot of irrelevant results.
