Tips For Building Effective Monitors

Have you found yourself struggling when it’s time to make your monitor rules? Or perhaps, your monitor continues to bring in irrelevant mentions and you’re not sure how to fix it? The monitor creation process can be intimidating at first, but with a few tips, you will be a professional in no time.

Keep reading to learn about the most common mistakes people make in monitor creation and tips that will help you build the best monitors possible.

The Basics
Before you start building your monitor, you will need to understand some of the basics of monitor rules.

And vs. Or Rules
Rule groups can contain one or more individual rules which are separated by the word “and.” Consequently, we refer to these rules as “and” rules. For “and” rules, each mention has to meet every rule criterion within a rule group to be pulled into the monitor. As a result, adding “and” rules narrows your search.

Multiple rule groups within the same monitor rules are called “or” rules. Although the word “OR” is not visible like with the “and” rules, the monitor will bring in any mentions that match all the criteria in at least one of the rule groups. So a monitor could bring in a mention that matches one rule group or the other. Multiple “or” rule groups will broaden your search.

Primary vs. Secondary Keywords
When creating monitors, you will usually use two different types of keywords. Knowing the difference between the two will help you with your research as well as create the most effective rules.

Primary keywords are keywords that include the brand name. These can be any handles, hashtags, or words that have the brand name within them. Secondary keywords can include things like products associated with the brand, commonly used hashtags that don’t include brand name or campaign hashtags.

Brand, competitor, and crisis monitors usually require both primary and secondary keywords, while industry monitors usually require just secondary keywords.

Four Tips For Creating Successful Monitors
Now that you understand the fundamentals, it’s time to start creating your monitor rules. Below we will talk about four tips that will help you build effective monitors, optimize your search across platforms, and gain the most valuable insights.

Tip #1: Do Your Research
Thorough research is key to effective monitor builds. Here are a few places to start.

Look up handles for all social media platforms associated with the brand and research brands that post frequently about or partner with the company. Make a list of names or hashtags associated products and campaigns. Separate your primary and secondary keywords into two different lists.

Making a list beforehand will help your rules be cleaner and more effective. You probably won’t get it perfect the first time around, and you will need to tweak the rules over time but this will help you get the best start.

Tip #2: Simple is Best
One of the most common mistakes that people make is including keyword phrases that are too long. If you are trying to bring in as many mentions as possible about your brand or the subject, this isn’t the best approach.

It’s best to keep it simple with 1-2 words in your keyword phrases max. What this does is allow room for error and variation. Here’s an example of what we mean.

If we wanted to monitor the phrase “Popeye’s chicken sandwich” it would be best to break it down. To do this, first we will identify the primary and secondary keywords. In this case, the primary keyword is “Popeye’s” and the secondary keywords are “chicken sandwich.”

Instead of typing in the phrase “Popeye’s chicken sandwich,” we will create one rule for my primary keywords and another one for my secondary keywords. This will help diversify the search by accounting for errors as well as all the different ways people could talk about Popeye’s chicken sandwich in a sentence. Here are examples of what we mean:

Including long phrases like seen above in the “Don’t” example, prevents you from being able to account for all the variations that people could use. It also limits your search to very specific mentions.

Instead, try layering multiple rules on each other with primary keywords in one rule group, and secondary keywords in the second rule group. This simplifies your search and will allow you to bring in more related mentions. Remember to simplify!

Tip #3: Optimize for Social Platforms
Because of the new restrictions on Facebook and Instagram’s API, it can be difficult to pull in mentions from these platforms. However, there are a few things you can do to optimize your search so that you have the best chance possible to pull posts in from them.

Optimizing your monitor search for Facebook and Instagram is especially useful for brand, crisis, or campaign monitors, and it doesn’t take much. The first thing you want to do is make sure that your social profiles are connected to your account. If you haven’t already done this, you can learn how to do that Here.

Once your Facebook and Instagram accounts are connected, you can then include rule groups that will help optimize your search of those platforms. Here is a helpful article on how to build these rules.

It’s important to remember that Facebook’s API only allows you to pull information from public business pages. You can include your public business page, or any page that may post frequently about you. If you need help finding pages that post about you, you can look under the “Community” Tab on the Facebook business profile, and find a list of the most recent tags.

If you are including social profile handles that aren’t your own, it’s important to also include primary and secondary keywords in the rule group. This will ensure that you are pulling in only their posts that are relevant to you. Here is an example:

Not including these optimization rules will almost guarantee that you won’t pull in mentions from these platforms. Facebook wants us to be as specific as possible with searches, and is more likely to give us these mentions if we are being intentional with our search.

Tip #4: Narrow With Inclusions, Not With Exclusions
When creating your rules, you have the option to either include or exclude certain keywords, social profiles, locations, and more. It’s common for people to try to narrow their search results by excluding information, but too many exclusions can often lead to contradicting rules and redundancies if you’re not careful.

Here are a few examples of commonly made mistakes with exclusion rules, and how to avoid them.

Example 1: Redundancies

When first creating a monitor, it’s common to bring in unrelated mentions that have similar names to your company or product. Common practice for these exclusions is including them on every single rule group, but sometimes that isn’t necessary.

Below is an example of a common mistake that people make when using exclusion rules. We want to bring in any time the domain for Popeye’s is mentioned but we also excluded a few specific keywords and unrelated accounts with similar names.

In this case, the exclusions aren’t necessary because, by default, anyone who mentions the Popeye’s domain will be talking specifically about Popeye’s and not an unrelated topic or account.

Instead, a single inclusion rule for the domain name is all you need. Because the domain name is specific to Popeye’s Chicken, the other exclusions are redundant and unnecessary.

The same logic works for rules that include specific social profiles. As seen in the example below, you don’t need to create exclusions for keywords, social profiles, languages, or location because, by default, the Popeye’s Twitter account is already relevant to the search without adding more rules.

Example 2: Contradictions

The second most common mistake that people make is including so many exclusions that the rules start to contradict each other. If you ever have a difficult time saving your monitor, it may be for this reason.

Here’s an example below. The highlighted green boxes shows where the @popeyeschicken handle was mentioned in both an inclusion and an exclusion rule. When adding exclusions rules, always double check to make sure you don’t have any contradictions.

Other examples of contradictions below are seen in how we’ve said we only want tweets from @popeyeschicken Twitter, but we have also included a rule to specify other social platforms as well. By default, the rule group will only bring in Twitter mentions from the @popeyeschicken twitter, and not any other social platforms or profiles.

Usually, you can narrow your monitor down with inclusion rules before you ever have to consider exclusions. This will keep your monitor rules simple and effective. There are times that exclusions are necessary which we will talk about below.

When Are Exclusions Necessary?

Let’s say you’ve been as specific as you can with inclusion rules, yet you are still getting unrelated mentions pulled into your monitor. Then it’s probably time to use a few exclusion rules.

Here are a few examples of when exclusions may be necessary:

• When common terms are used across different industries
• When you don’t want to see your own posts
• When “not safe for work” terms frequently pop up
• When spam accounts keep popping up even with narrowed results

Exclusions rules are a really helpful tool. However, it’s important to not overuse and over complicate them to avoid redundancies and contradictions within your rule groups.

Better Monitors, Better Results

Learning how to build monitors effectively by doing your research, keeping it simple, optimizing across platforms, and avoiding redundancies and contradictions is important. These simple tips will help you create the most effective monitors and bring in the best results possible. Keeping these results as clean and accurate as possible is what will help you drive important business decisions for your team and company.

For more help on monitor builds and the Nuvi app, please visit our Help Center.