Back in March, we talked about a rapid prototyping project we’ve been working on. FoggerMap is a mapping and tracking device that integrates with mosquito foggers used to spray municipalities. As such, we’d like to be alerted to certain terms that pop up on the web and on social media. Alerts on the web in general are easy! Alerts on other platforms? Not so much.
Setting up a Google Alert
To set up one or a few Google alerts, just go to google.com/alerts, and enter a search term for the topic you want to track. Choose “Show Options” to drill down on the alert criteria: how often you want to receive emails, what sources you want to see (news, blogs, books, finance, etc.), language, region, and whether you want to receive all the results or just the “best” ones. Enter your email address, and there’s your alert. We maintain that everyone should use at least one Google alert to track mentions of their name on the web.
But what if you want to receive a lot of Google alerts on multiple different keywords? The emails can get overwhelming. If you’re a Gmail user already, you can solve that problem by implementing an app for Gmail that bundles your Google alerts together. It’s called Inbox by Google, and you can install it on your iOS device, your Android device, or your web-based Gmail.
Monitoring Social Media Mentions
You may or may not have noticed that tweets and public Facebook posts don’t necessarily get indexed by Google. Back in 2015, Google and Twitter cut a deal to give Google access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data—consisting of nearly 9,000 tweets per second. Google has increased its indexing of tweets, but it’s not even close to indexing ALL tweets. It’s pretty selective too, choosing to index Twitter users with high follower counts. (It probably goes without saying, but only publicly posted tweets would be indexed by Google, of course.)
Similarly, not all public Facebook posts are indexed. Google’s algorithms are notoriously mysterious, so it’s difficult to know how it chooses which posts to index. We do know that indexing doesn’t seem to be affected by the number of shares, how many friends a user has, or how fresh a post is.
You can always search for your keywords manually on Twitter or Facebook (or other social media platforms), but it’s not exactly an efficient method. You might want to use a social media monitoring tool like Mention or Hootsuite or Brand24. Both of these are paid services, but they’re a lot more accurate than any free tools we’ve tried. (Do you have a free tool you like? If so, email us!)
Now, one of the platforms that might yield useful information is Nextdoor. And we do not know of any existing tools that allow you to track keywords on Nextdoor. BUT… Nextdoor does have an API.
API stands for Application Programming Interface. When a software company offers an API, it means that they’ve built a set of dedicated URLs that return naked data responses. Nothing fancy, just pure data. And Nextdoor does have an API. In that case, you’d hire an API developer who can harness that API by scraping the site with some Javascript and caching the results in your own database created for that purpose. Whether or not you want to go that route all depends on how valuable the data is to you. Nextdoor is growing rapidly, and in our FoggerMap example above, it might just be worth it to develop this custom solution. Mosquito fogging is a hot topic in neighborhoods. If you’re trying to track keywords related to investment portfolios, maybe not so much.
Want to talk keywords and tracking? Contact us anytime.
