You should now know how to set up goals and use the measurements provided by social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to start a social media campaign. The next step in creating your social media program is to establish regular monitoring about your company and/or the topics your program will address. To do so you need to understand keywords.

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Social Media Analysis: Understanding Keywords
04/20/2012
Adapted from article originally published at PRSA Philadelphia
by Heather Read
You should now know how to set up goals and use the measurements provided by social networks like
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to start a social media campaign. The next step in creating your social
media program is to establish regular monitoring about your company and/or the topics your program
will address. To do so you need to understand keywords.
Inclusive Keywords
Social media language isn’t always straightforward when it comes to setting up a search. Before you can
measure, you need to understand how your company is being discussed. This is especially difficult if you
have a very common name. Say for example, Orange. If you were to just search for “Orange” on Twitter,
you’d get posts about the telecommunications company, about people enjoying an orange they ate,
orange juice they drank, locations with Orange in the street name, or links to Amazon.com with every
orange-something product under the sun.
To get the best keywords, identify if there are regular words that people include with your company
name that could narrow the search. For example, if your company is actually called Orange Baskets and
you sell fruit baskets, in your keyword set you will always want to include the word “basket” or
“baskets.” To best identify inclusive terms, think of all the possible ways users could talk about you-
whether its product names, how they use your product, categories, industry terms, etc. List them out on
a page and see how they fit together. Get rid of those that overlap or are too broad. Be careful in how
you select inclusive terms, especially for Twitter, as using too many terms or being too narrow in your
focus can result in missing something. Using a phrase is also a good approach, but be simple and limit
yourself to just a few words.
Exclusive Keywords
Just like inclusive words are used to narrow the search, excluding certain words can also help refine the
results. To identify the right words, pick the words that appear most often in irrelevant posts. Even if we
were to see examples of someone talking about “my Orange contract,” which discusses their cell phone
plan with the telecommunications company named Orange, “contract” may not be what you pick to
exclude. Excluding this one term could make you miss a tweet from a supplier talking about a contract
they just signed with Orange the fruit company.
In this example, I’d recommend these words as exclusions: cell phone, wireless, juice, street, st
(abbreviation for street), and everything on www.amazon.com. I did not pick terms like “ate” or “cell”

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@heatherread
(also short for cellophane) to exclude because they are too closely tied to the kind of products Orange
Baskets sells.
To move forward with your exclusions list, jot down all the commonly irrelevant words, and compare
them to your inclusive list to make sure combining them won’t exclude a relevant conversation. Be
prepared to add to your exclusions list regularly, but be aware that Twitter and even advanced
monitoring vendors have character limits which make very long exclusion lists problematic.
Setting up the search
Now that you have a list of inclusive and exclusive terms, you need to know how to put them together.
With most search tools, either basic or advanced search operations are used. This means pairing AND or
OR with the set of keywords, including words together through the use of quotation marks and
parenthesis. Exclusions are typically added by using AND NOT or simply a minus sign.
In our example above, our initial search would likely look like:
“Orange Baskets” OR (“Orange AND Baskets” OR “Orange AND Baskets” OR “gift AND Orange
AND produce”) -”cell phone” -wireless – juice -street -st
Recall, we also wanted to block things from Amazon.com. Some monitoring tools will allow you to
create a source filter list where you would add in http://www.amazon.com as a source and then add it
to what you want to block. If that is not an option, you can try simply using: AND NOT amazon.com.
The basic search that we have above may not always be entirely useful as it’s still very broad. Some
monitoring tools also allow you to use proximity search, which means that you can include or exclude
keywords within a certain number of words of each other. In our example, if the mapping of inclusive
keywords indicated that for purchases of Orange Baskets products people usually will use the words
orange, basket and gift within five words of each other, we would be better to use a proximity search.
Social network specific nuances
Twitter, unlike any other social network, has the most peculiarities to consider when setting up social
media monitoring. The biggest issues to keep in mind are hashtags. Just because you use the word “gift”
doesn’t mean that you will pick up mentions of “#gift” which uses a hashtag. You need to be very clear
about how to use your monitoring tool and how it treats instances like that. The result could be a lot
more keywords to include up front. To capture twitter conversation, in most cases you should also add
key phrases as one-word hashtags.
Also keep in mind that hashtags evolve and can be seemingly unrelated to the actual topic. You may
follow #socialmedia as a hashtag on Twitter for general updates, but if you were interested in watching
the conversation about emergency managers’ use of social media specifically, you would need to add
#smem as an inclusive keyword to your search. Often you will pick up these new hashtags by reviewing

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the post text from the main set of monitoring, or from blog posts that provide instructions to users on
how to communicate about the topic.
The use of location check-in services like FourSquare also has a serious effect on your search for Twitter.
Locations with street names that are similar to your name can often fill up your search results. If this is
the case, you need to be more specific about the keyword exclusions you are using regarding address
names.
Finally, both Twitter and Facebook have the problem of trying to block usernames that contain your
keywords in them. By this, I mean an example such as Orange Baskets blocking a Twitter user called
@Orange_Smith who frequently posts about gift baskets she buys. Some monitoring tools allow you to
add Twitter or Facebook usernames to a source list for blocking. But this doesn’t mean it will block
mentions of that user by others-specifically, on Twitter this means @replies, mentions and Retweets.
Overall, monitoring is a critical piece in measuring the success of your social media program and
knowing whether you are meeting your goals, as well as calculating your impact on the overall
conversation. I highly recommend investing in a professional social media monitoring tool, as there is
only so much you can analyze by creating a Twitter search on a hashtag or single keyword.