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Operator “OR”

We have great news for you who use Scup for Facebook monitoring. Now you can use the operator OR, and make searches with more than one word, using pipe |. What does that mean?

That means that you can reduce the number of searches by words.

For example, if you want to create a search with the words “car” and “motorcycle”, that words could be in the same search. Like this way: car | motorcycle.

Using this operator, you can reduce your searches on Scup. Today, Facebook allows us to collect items for only the last 30 days, but may be extended in the future. The items that are collected are just the public ones.

If you had Facebook searches registered, how do you configure this option without losing previously collected items?

1. Create a new search with keywords and the pipe | ,
2. Then pause your old searches on Facebook.

Searches by “exact words/phrase”

Now, you can register searches with keywords “exact”, using quotation marks (“”), like, “old car” to see the exactly result of this expression.

You also can use in the same search the operator pipe (|) and quotation marks (“”), like the example: “old car” | “old motorcycle”.

PS: This search ignores characters between the key words.

Search by “locale”

To have more specific searchs, you can use “locale”, a search that combines language + local.

Facebook searches become more effective with locale selection, which includes goes beyond simply language selection.  For example, you can search Spanish item keywords original only from Spain.

Available languages are listed on the form to add Facebook’s search.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us: help@scup.net

This week, we added new functionality to help you exclude words from being collected.

Exclusion of Words by Search

Some social media don’t allow the use of operators to exclusion of words by search. For example, today Facebook don’t allow any way to exclude words in a search, so same results can “dirty” your monitoring.

How does exclusion by Word work?

Exclusion by word is rule-driven.  This rule and the words or expressions that will be exclude and register like the images below.

You can also choose the period that this exclusion will happen: every day or in some specific period.

How to register words?

You can use words or exact phrases to create your exclusion rules.

For example, if you don’t want to collect items about the Simpsons cartoon in a FOX Channel monitoring, type in the first line the exact phrase, “The Simpsons”, but you don’t need to use quotation marks (” “), just the expression itself.

You can also use regular expressions, like: if your rule needs to exclude items that have the words “have” and “having”, type in the first line the expression /hav(e|ing)/i

In this way, the rule will identify the items that have one of these words. You noticed that in this example were typed slashes in the begin and in the end of the expression (that is necessary for this rule to work) and after that the letter “i”, to be case insensitive. To understand better a regular expression and how it works, look at this website.

PS:

• This rule can’t be applied to older items, the exclusion starts when the rule is completed, and just for new items.
• You can save items in your searches by collecting less items and focusing on what’s needed.
• A very important tip: if the Social Media that you are monitoring allows exclusion operators, like in Twitter the sign “-” (minus), always use that proceeding. To know more about the logic of each Social Media click here.

If you have any questions or suggestions, contact us: help@scup.net.

Social media monitoring has been changing the way that companies deal with the data available on the Internet, helping them to create market intelligence reports, and develop strategies of impact in relationship on specific social networks. In this scenario, it becomes increasingly important to capture data more accurately, especially when it comes to customer service operations (SAC 2.0). A major challenge for this scenario is called “Blind Spot”, the set of relevant mentions about the brand that are not captured through monitoring.

Studies show that in some specific cases, almost 80% of relevant mentions about the brand may not be captured. This represents a significant problem for companies, which hope to get the majority of mentions. We discuss here some cases where this effect “blind spot” can occur and how Scup is positioned to minimize this problem.

What are the causes of blind spots?

You can “lose” mentions in your monitoring for several reasons. Some of them are technological issues and others are in the way that the monitoring tool was configured or customized.

Some technological issues:

• Closed profiles (defined privacy by user)
• Social Networks that do not provide APIs or data interfaces for searching information
• Incorrect language identification of posting
• Content Filters made ​​by data providers

Questions of configuration / customization of the tool:

• Choosing inadequate keywords
• Unavailability of customizing search expressions to remove or include a specific term

How to minimize and avoid as much as possible?

We can guard against blid spots through a basic job of choosing keywords, which is part of the strategy for monitoring a project: choosing keywords that also involve variations and slang, as well as choosing properly the language and location and optimize search expressions is essential.

However, besides the target here is to avoid blind spots, and being aware of those ones that you cannot eliminate. This awareness is important for companies, which provide aligned monitoring services with the information and their customers.

Scup is clearly positioned to assist these two points. An example is the way searches are registered, network to network, which means that you cannot register a keyword in all searches automatically, since  it misleads behavior that generates a lot of blind spots (keywords and expressions in a network cannot work on others, or some specific network can optimize the results.)

Another example is the way we deal with search expressions. We seek to explain the data source and represent the exact search on Scup in the way it is done on the network. The user knows what to expect from search, and does not get that feeling of “black-box”, without knowing where or how the results are being collected. For teams that work very seriously with social media it is essential.

Like it? Do you have any suggestions or questions? Send an email to us support@scup.com.br, or any of our social media channels.

Exporting is one of the features that most helps our customers to generate reports. W e made this post so that you can understand all the exporting options so your reports will become more complete and more effective.

You can filter the items you want to export to files in CSV (Excel) format directly to   Scup Monitor, segmenting information according to your need. The options to filter the items are:

• Keyword

• Date

• Registered searches

• Publications

The benefit of exporting items by filter is that the analyzed data will just be what you want.  For example: If your monitoring has many tags or searches, it does not need to export everything and build filters.  If the analysis must be done in a search, only your work will be simplified with this filter action.

You can export the items that really matter, just choose among the filter possibilities: tags and search you want to export. See the video, how is the selection of filters:

Exporting historical of user and publications

After exporting the data it is possible to compare the data in spreadsheets, or produce a specific report about effect publications or relationship with a particular client. On the worksheet, you can separate by social network used for publications, items that were removed and the contents from the responses.

Just click the button to export the chat historical with specific users or all publications produced within Scup. Watch the video to understand how this feature works:

Limit of exporting plans

There is no limit over the amount of items exported from monitoring.  This is an essential operation that helps our customers on a daily basis, to prepare reports and control the relationship actions, and for this reason we believe you should have unlimited access to your data.

Exporting Control

In the Tools tab you can see the historical of effect exporting, available information are:

• Number of exported items

• Collaborator

• Date

The period available for viewing is the anniversary date of your plan, of which your plan expires in 01 day the view of exporting is the first of the current month until the first day of next month. The intention is that exporting may be registered for security reasons in customer transactions.

Exporting Data

Exporting to Excel organizes the data in a spreadsheet on your monitoring, so you can compare data and generate reports.  Here is an example of exporting data to Excel:

Do you have any question or suggestion? Send it to us: support@scup.com.br

If you use Facebook’s search on Scup, we have some news that will make your life much better.

1) Scheduling and publishing with approval: now you can schedule publishes and choose if this will be free or with moderation.

2) Interaction: answer Facebook’s items inside your monitor. Remember that the comments rules are the same of Facebook’s, and can be send in these cases:

A – The user is the owner of Facebook’s account:
- If the item is on your mural;
- If the item is on your friend’s mural;
- If the item is on a page’s mural that I’m fan and not an administrator.

B – The page is administrated by user:
- If the item is on page’s mural that I’m the administrator.

3) Search by comments: now the Facebook’s search collect the comments made on publications. Those items receive a marking to facilitate the identification on your monitoring.

Monitoring retweets is often a requested task by those who work with monitoring in social media.  In general, those who need to monitor a RT is in one of these two situations:

-          Monitoring RTs to determine winners of a promotion placed via Twitter, or

-          Monitoring RTs to determine the scope when they had, for example, an influential Twitter’s user speaks well or poorly about a given topic.

These situations can be handled in different ways, to ensure that their monitoring captures all RTs. [update 07/15/2011] Now Scup performs the grouping of all the retweets. Learn more here.

Before we begin, you must understand what the retweet is? We know that Twitter handles this type of message in two different ways, the traditional and older (“RT @ username message from the original user”) and the latest and most widely used.

(“@ username message from the original user”). We explain more about the differences between the traditional RT and current   RT in another post on blog and recommend reading before continuing on this post.

Now that you know the difference, let’s discuss the two situations in monitoring of RTs.

Monitoring retweets via Twitter for promotions

Every day we see in our timelines at least one promotion involving retweets. The mechanism of this type of promotion usually asks participants for sending a tweet in the standard way “I want to win it” to compete for a prize.

But how to configure your monitoring to collect all the messages from the participants of the promotion, as there are different ways to retweet a message?

To ensure that your monitoring captures all messages related to the promotion, it would be great, if the retweeted message use hashtags (or markers), which is a way to categorize messages on Twitter about a topic, using the symbol # followed by the key-word or topic. For example: # worldcup, #90s and so on.

Therefore, when the promotion requires a condition from the participants about using a hashtag (“# I want to participate to # the promotion-name”), this greatly facilitates the work on monitoring; a simple search for a #-name-promotion collects all collected messages without difficulty.

But if for any reason you cannot use hashtags in the promotion, the next tip will do the job…

Monitoring common retweets

The first thing to think of a strategy to monitor any retweet is to examine the original message and understand its characteristics. Let’s use the below as a tweet example:

Note that this message has several complicating factors for the monitoring, such as quotes, hyphens, and links. What would be the best way to monitor the possible RTs that received this tweet?

Generic search, using only as key-word “@ rafinhabastos” would collect RTs, but also thousands of messages out of scope.

Then, a search through the link in the tweet (in this case a YouTube video) would not be efficient because when that message is retweeted, the link can be changed by automatic URL shorteners, depending on the program that each user uses to read its tweets.

The best way to monitor RTs from one tweets as the example above would be by identifying the keywords of the tweet and gather them in the same search.

In the case of this message, we could set up the search as follows: “MC@ rafinhabastos sou foda cqc 3.0″ (with the quotes to ensure that we want to collect messages that have all of these terms).

Remember that you can always test if your search is collecting the items you need before you create it on Scup. Just use the bottom “Previous view on Twitter” when you are creating the search.

Following these tips, you prevent the search brings unnecessary garbage and ensures that RTs will be properly monitored.

[update 10/27/2011] Another solution to monitor Retweets search is to use Firehose. Learn more about this search on another post.

Anyone working with support services on social networks, such as Twitter, may have encountered the following situation: a sudden message, “It was not possible to send you message.”  Usually without any explanation.

You try again and nothing. You check if the internet is working by searching on Google and if everything is ok. Not bad, the world is not over, yet! But what happened? Just today you were humming along and Twitter decides to finish off your joy?

The answer to this is the limit that Twitter has established for the use of its network. For safety reasons and to relieve the pressure on its servers, Twitter applies the following daily limits for posting messages:

Updates (tweets and retweets): 1,000 per day – the daily limit is divided into half-hour intervals, that is, you can publish an average of 21 messages every half-hour period;

Direct messages (DMs): 250 per day.

And there’s no way to bypass these limits. So, if you for some reason receive messages warning you that it was not possible to publish your updates… there’s no point in getting upset with Twitter.  Simply play a little FarmVille and try again later.

Did you know that not all public tweets or retweets can be monitored? And we’re not talking about direct messages or profiles, which for privacy reasons are not monitored, but the tweets that can normally be viewed in any public profile.

This can be verified by searching on Twitter, which reflects the results that the API provides for any monitoring tool.

Here’s a useful example:

The user’s profile @ Rosa_Linda171 is active in public. However, a search on Twitter for the name of that user does not return any mention, as if the user did not exist. See the pictures:

User’s profile:

Results to the search on Twitter for user’s name:

But why that user’s tweets are not being indexed on Twitter search, and therefore do not appear on a monitoring?
In order to avoid bottlenecks on the network and trying to provide a better experience for those using the search system, Twitter has created ways to prevent abuse by @s.
Here are some examples of what is considered abuse in the use of the service, translated from Twitter Help Center:

• publishing the same content repeatedly or with few changes (links or tweets);
• exaggerating the use of hashtags (# issue) or the mention of trending topics (TTs);
• sending messages or automatic responses;
• using robots or similar apps to publish messages based on keywords;
• publishing similar messages in different accounts;
• follow or stop following a lot of @ s in short periods of time.
Users who fit into any one or more of these behaviors can have their messages deleted from the search results or even get their accounts suspended.

To determine which users commit abuses, Twitter ranks all messages from a combination of metrics and defines a score for each profile, based on the quality of tweets in a certain period of time.
This explains why retweets in response to a user with the same content or very similar to each other are eliminated from the search by Twitter and are not collected by monitoring tools.

And why is it important to know?
In practical terms, this phenomenon can affect mainly deals, retweets campaigns and customer service operations; they have many difficulties to precise measurements to analyze if they are considering the entire user base.

It is very common, for example, users participating in promotions based on retweets of specific messages in an attempt to increase your chances, to forwardthe same message several times and create profiles for this purpose.

To learn more about this topic, visit these links on rules for using Twitter and best practices for using it (in English).

Every day, Scup captures millions of items to thousands of listing searches. All this happens through an API provided by Twitter, which is an interface designed to provide access to the messages that are circulating on that network.

As you know, the shared messages by Twitter can be divided into tweets, when a user creates something and shares it with its followers or retweets, when a user forwards it to its followers the content that other users shared on Twitter. [update 07/15/2011] Now Scup does all the grouping of retweets. Learn more in this post.

RT vs Retweet

To create a retweet, the traditional way, simply copy the content of the message and write “RT” at the start . This way, you can add information and edit the original message. But the most important in terms of monitoring is that retweet is register as if it was a new message. So all is content is crawled by Twitter Search, and consequently, sent to Scup by API.

In 2009, Twitter implemented a simpler way to generate retweets. Since then, simply move your mouse over the timeline and click “Retweet”. It was much easier to share content, eliminating the need for “copy paste”. On the other hand, besides not being possible to edit this retweet, other users can block the view for this type of message in their timelines. And API of Twitter only returns to the tools for monitoring the message from RT @ username.

Below is the difference between the two types of retweets for monitoring tools.

That is, if you are monitoring retweets from a specific user, you cannot capture all the retweets from this user, because each time it uses the current format for retweets, only the message content will be available for the search, not the @ username .