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Listening Basics

Listening Basics

Monitoring Versus Listening

Monitoring involves the messages and conversations the public has with the unit’s brand and accounts. These messages typically tag the account or post the content directly to the account. These messages can be monitored through account notifications. Examples of messages seen through monitoring include:

  • Private and direct messages to the account/page
  • Comments and replies to the account’s posts
  • Posts on the page
  • Messages tagging the account (in text or image)

Listening involves the messages and conversations the public has about the unit’s brand and accounts. These often do not tag the account and users may not be aware of the content unless they go searching for it and the content is posted publicly so that it can be seen by non-followers of the posting account. Examples of messages seen through listening include:

  • Posts naming a unit or brand but not @ mentioning their account
  • Messages referring to the unit or brand, including those using slang, alternative names or misspellings

Benefits of Monitoring and Listening

  • Monitoring can help units to fulfill the public’s expectations that the unit will engage with their content.
  • Listening can lead to insights and critical awareness to which units may not otherwise have access.
  • Both monitoring and listening can help units develop stronger content.
  • Both can help units detect and address issues early to prevent escalation.

How to Conduct Listening

To conduct listening, follow this general process:

  1. Build a positive keyword list(s). These are words that should be included in the search.
  2. Build a negative keyword list(s). These are words that should be excluded from the search, such as false positive matches, competition or irrelevant content.
  3. Build and test the queries to determine if they’re bringing in the messages that should be included. 
  4. Iterate. Users may need to tweak the formula and/or keyword lists to fine-tune the results. 
  5. Save all work. Saving to the system or saving the query in a text document to replicate for future searches will allow users to keep track of searches as they are built and will help to make future searches more efficient. 

Using lists of keywords can help make the query building process more efficient because the sets of words can be reused when they appear in multiple topics. Updating the keyword list will update the set of words across topics.

Even if a unit does not use an official keyword list in the system, keeping track of the words used and categorizing them into lists can help make query building a faster process with consistent results over time.

Here are some things to keep in mind while building keyword lists:

  • Think of each list as a category of search terms. These might relate to a brand, program, person or topic.
  • Consider slang or alternative names/terms.
  • Consider plurals.
  • Don’t forget to include common misspellings and phonetic spellings.
  • Consider when to break a large keyword list into smaller lists. For example, there might be a large “athletics“ list, or sport-specific lists that can be combined, when necessary, to cover the broader topic of athletics. 
  • Keep in mind system limitations. Sprinklr does not require case sensitive terms, but some other systems do.

Boolean operators are components that can be combined into formulas when building a listening query. 

Below are a few common Boolean operators:

  • AND = requires matching all the included terms
  • OR = requires matching one of the included terms
  • NOT = requires the term(s) be excluded from search results
  • “ “ = phrases in quotation marks must match exactly
  • ( , ) = to match any of a set of words, place them in parentheses, separated by commas 

Use Boolean operators and various keywords (or keyword lists) to create a query.

The basic Boolean formula can be thought of as:
This AND This NOT That

Below are some examples of Boolean formula queries to search for conversation about a local coffee shop:

  • Lansing AND coffee NOT Starbucks
  • “East Lansing“ AND coffee NOT Starbucks
  • (“East Lansing“ OR Okemos) AND (coffee OR latte OR cappuccino) NOT (Starbucks, Sparty’s, Sparties, “Foster Coffee,“ “Blue Owl“)

Documentation updated: Feb. 20, 2024

Listening