Rival IQ Social Listening tools help you measure and understand conversations and customer sentiment. This guide walks you through the different filters and keyword fields you can use to create meaningful searches and extract the most relevant information for your listening analyses.

One of the first things to consider when building a search is to specify the right set of keywords. Our tool provides you with 3 fields for fine-tuning your social listening query.

The FIND field finds posts or documents that include any of the specified primary terms in the body of the post or article (but not the title). The more terms you include in this field, the broader your search will be. For example, when analyzing brand health, you might want to include the name of your business, social media handles, or branded hashtags commonly used in discussions about your business. To look for financial results of public companies, including the stock ticker symbol may also be useful.

To return data for Nordstrom, at a minimum a query should include their brand, primary social handle, and branded hashtag.

The INCLUDE field helps to increase the precision of your search. It reduces the document set found by the primary terms to include only documents that contain at least one of the terms included in this input within either the body or the title of the document. (Note that some types of documents, like Tweets, don't have a title field.)

You can use this field to:

If the FIND field contains primary terms for Nordstrom, the INCLUDE field could limit matches to only posts/documents that contain both Nordstrom AND "shoe" or "boot" or "footwear." The wildcard (*) character matches multiple variants of the specified term; for example, boot* matches "boot," "boots," and "booties."

The EXCLUDE field helps refine your query further by excluding content that contains any specified word or phrase. It is useful for removing irrelevant or off-topic discussions.

The example below removes unwanted noise and spam, such as posts that contain "coupons" and "promo codes." Excluding the terms "stock," "buy rating," and "research report" removes stock analysis posts.

Another critical part of building a search is selecting the data sources. By default, Rival IQ includes data from all available sources, but you can choose any combination of sources you want, including just a single source.

The Reduce Noise section help you to exclude various types of typically unwanted content, such as ads, sponsored posts, job ads, coupons, pornography, auto-posts, and profanity.

Use the EXCLUDE Authors section to exclude noisy or high-volume authors. Rival IQ automatically provides a list of authors who post most frequently about your currently defined search.

The EXCLUDE Domains section allows you to exclude domains that contain spam, noise, or irrelevant information for your analysis. The section automatically provides a list of high-volume domains within the data set.

For ideas on how to use social listening to inform social media and traditional marketing strategies, see Incorporating Social Listening into Your Marketing Strategy.