A topic is a search query that contains a string of keywords (variations on the spelling and other common search terms that frequently appear together with your monitoring subject). YouScan will use these keywords to search for mentions on social media.
The monitoring subject can be a brand name, a company, a person, an ad campaign, an entire field (for example, to find out what people say about the dairy industry online), etc. Every monitoring topic will contain a separate mention stream, a collection of metrics and analytics, send email notifications, etc.
Different topics can be compared and contrasted with one another.
As an example, let's take a look at how a search query is created for VISA bank cards.
1. Creating a topic
Select "Create topic" in the menu located above your list of topics.
2. Setting up your filters
Select your preferred language, countries and source types.
⚠️ Note that users often don't specify their location in their social media profiles. This is why we recommend selecting the "Not defined" filter in the Country filter, so you don't miss out on important mentions.
The language of a mention can be difficult to detect, so we recommend adding "Undefined" (Latin) or "Undefined" (Cyrillic) to your preferred language, depending on your needs.
💡 These basic filters are applied to the entire query. If you want to apply filters only to a specific part of the query to refine it, use the advanced operators.
All filters that you have selected can be seen in the thread of topics. To do this, hover over the filters icon.
3. The search query
In order to get the most accurate and complete results, use YouScan's special query vocabulary, which consists of the basic and advanced operators.
Basic operators include:
OR - used to list the different spelling of your keywords
AND - used for conjunctions of several keywords or search terms
/n (distance between words) - used to set the parameters for distance between words (n is substituted with the number of spaces you'd like to add, so /1, /2 and so on)
Stop words - used to exclude mentions that contain certain words
"Quotation marks" - used to search for an exact word or phrase as it appears inside the quotation marks
(Brackets) - used to group together words under the same operator.
Advanced operators include:
Country: - collects mentions only from a specific country;
Language: - collects mentions in a specific language only;
Source: **- helps you monitor only certain sources (e.g.: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc);
SourceType: - helps you monitor specific types of sources (e.g.: social networks, news, blogs, forums etc);
PostType: - helps you collect only specific types of posts (e.g.: comments, posts, reposts, extended reposts);
ContentType: - helps you collect only specific type of content (e.g.: images)
Read more about logical operators and the search query vocabulary here.
To get the best results, include different spelling of keywords in different languages, common mistakes, adjectives and hashtags that appear alongside the word using the OR operator:
If the keywords are not unique, include helper words to narrow down your search using the AND operator, or /n and brackets to group several words together:
Spaces for the /n operator are chosen through trial-and-error. For example, if the name of your monitoring subject contains two words or more, use /1 between the words. For example: Burger /1 King.
You may use advanced operators if you would like to refine your query and apply filters only to its specific part. For example, you are interested in collecting mentions about Visa. The task is:
you need to monitor only TikTok, but not the rest of social networks;
you also want to collect every review from various platforms.
In this case you need to use source: operator to define the exact social network you want to monitor (TikTok) and sourceType: operator to let the system know you need to collect reviews from various platforms:
You should also use advanced operators in the following case:
you would like to collect all the mentions about Visa from Instagram, they need to be in French.
at the same time all the mentions from France need to be in English
The challenge here is that to collect mentions from Instagram (or Telegram), you should always turn off any geography filters. At the same time, you need to define the geography for the second part of the query. In this case, to collect necessary mentions you should combine country: and language: operators
You have the ability to preview how many mentions are collected for your monitoring subject at the topic creation stage. You can use these preliminary results to edit your search query and choose your stop words.
A good selection of stop words will ensure the cleanest results and simplify the subsequent work with mentions.
Take note that punctuation (, : ! ? _ . ; etc.), special characters, and multiple consecutive spaces do not work in search queries and will be treated the same as a single space.
Once you're happy with the results in the preview and you have finished setting up the query, press "Create topic"
🎉Success! Your monitoring topic has been created. New mentions, as well as mentions published within the past 30 days, will be collected automatically (as long as their number doesn't exceed 100,000).
If you need to collect older mentions, please feel free to launch historical data collection in the topic settings.
Happy monitoring!