5 secret Social Listening Strategies Using Boolean Search

In social listening, Boolean search is something of a magic move. It takes you above the rest. It finds online brand mentions that built-in wizards can’t find, gets rid of all the irrelevant noise, searches for the most obscure queries, and helps with tasks that seem like they have nothing to do with social listening (e.g., SEO).

However, for Boolean search to do all that, you need techniques. In this article, we’ll go through:

What exactly defines Boolean search and social listening

5 Boolean search techniques to improve your social listening

How to put the two together to find hot leads online

What is social listening?

Social listening goes far beyond the realm of social media platforms. If you have any online presence in your market at all, customers are more than likely talking about you on social media platforms, websites, blogs, review sites, and anywhere else they get together to share opinions and ideas.

If that comes as news to you, you’re not alone. In fact, you’d probably like to know who’s talking about you and what they’re saying, right? Enter social listening.

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Simply put, you are “listening” to what the internet is saying about your business so you can gain valuable insight, obtain helpful feedback, and stamp out potential wildfires. While that may sound a little overwhelming, with the help of specialized tools, you can actually mainstream the process of collecting and responding to comments and feedback. One such tool is boolean search.

What is Boolean search?

Boolean search is named after George Boole, an English mathematician from the 19th century who developed an algebraic method described in “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic". Boolean algebra presented there is applied in programming languages and used in search engines.

Boolean algebra consists of Boolean logic operators such as AND, OR, AND NOT, etc. By combining Boolean operators you can create very specific search queries.

5 effective social listening techniques using Boolean search

Now that you understand Boolean search operators, here are five Boolean search techniques that will take the social listening aspect of your digital marketing strategy to a new level.

1. Find mentions of brands with common words as names.

Social listening can be complicated for brands named after common words, e.g., Apple, Orange, Forever 21, etc. If using simple social listening and most results that you get are irrelevant, it’s time to turn to Boolean search and create a more specific query.

For this, you’ll need the AND NOT operator. AND NOT excludes documents that contain a particular word(s). You’ll be telling the program to include all documents that have the X word in them AND that don’t have the Y word.

For example:

Apple AND NOT (“tasty” OR “fruit” OR “juice” OR “pie” OR “recipe” OR “tree”).

In a social listening tool for creating alerts, the above search query will look like this:

With this search query, you can be sure that the results you get have nothing to do with apple the fruit ― only Apple the brand. You might, however, have to add some other words to the query once you run the first search and realize you didn’t think of some other words that signal that the document is about apple the fruit.

2. Find mentions of brands with complicated names

Some brand names include punctuation and are case sensitive, which is not default for social listening tools. Examples include “L’Oreal”, “more & more”, “H&M”, etc. For such names, you need Boolean search to make sure all brand mentions are found. To create punctuation and/or case-sensitive Boolean query, you’ll need operators: +“ ” and ++“ ”.

+ “ ” ensures exact match search takes into account special characters and punctuation of your keyword (this is normally ignored) but ignores lower and upper cases.

++ “ ” takes into account special characters, punctuation, and lower and upper cases of your keyword.

So, if you’re searching for mentions of “L’Oreal” you can use +

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5 secret Social Listening Strategies Using Boolean Search

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