How to use boolean search to improve your brand monitoring

Searching online mentions can sometimes seem to be a daunting task! Companies subscribe to different brand monitoring tools. While doing so, they hope they will be able to monitor their brand effectively. Unfortunately, many companies will miss a handful of high-value mentions simply because the tool uses poor search strategies. Even worse, they are swamped in irrelevant mentions about brands with similar names! This is the main cause of dilemma for brand managers, PR desk executives, and marketing executives while trying to implement online brand monitoring. But did you know that Boolean Search can improve the experience?

Before we jump into teaching you how to use Boolean Search for brand monitoring, we want to make sure you understand the basics. Simply defined, Boolean Search uses the Boolean logic to search for certain words or phrases through massive amounts of data. Therefore, by using Keywords and Boolean Operators in your brand monitoring, you restrict or widen the searches. In short, the Boolean operators provide your search tool with some criteria to use when searching a database. Therefore, you can always drill down to the specific mentions that matter to your brand. The most commonly used Boolean operators are AND, OR, Not, and NEAR.

In this article, our focus is to educate you on how to use Boolean Search for a better brand monitoring experience. First, we will identify what you can achieve using Boolean Search as the basis for brand monitoring. Then, we will look at some of the basics you need to effectively use Boolean Search. Towards the end, we will also focus on Mentionlytics tool and how you can effectively use Boolean search criteria to monitor your brand online using it. Without further ado, let’s get started!

So, What Can You Achieve Using Boolean Search?

Did you know that main search engines like Google use Boolean search? We have already indicated that Boolean Search in brand monitoring helps you to get more precise. Therefore, using Boolean searches, you can monitor mentions that are flooding in more effectively.

Using Boolean search, you can be able to:

1. Broaden or Narrow your alert as per the preferences: The Boolean search operators are very useful when it comes to querying. To begin with, you want to get alerts on precise mentions. These are alerts of searches that mention your brand or products. Therefore, use the Boolean search to make sure you can achieve these.
2. Use More Search Terms: Effective brand monitoring requires you to be vigilant. In so doing, you will be expected to know about keyword variations. There are many possible keywords that clients are using while searching online. Therefore, you want to be able to use all these possible terms to ensure you don’t miss mentions. Does your brand monitoring tool limit you when it comes to using of search terms?
3. Focus Your Brand Monitoring On Specific Regions: You want to be able to monitor your brand in such a way that you can focus where there is higher potential. With Boolean search operators, you can be more specific even when it comes to regionally based searches.

That is a summary of how a good Boolean search can be useful for your brand monitoring efforts. Further, it is very important that you understand the important basic when using Boolean searches. This enables you to identify the brand monitoring tools that you should be using. In the following section, we focus on some of the tips for conducting a Boolean search. You will learn about the different operators and general search rules when it comes to conducting searches.

Tips for Effective Implementation of Boolean Search for Brand Monitoring

1. Make Sure You Understand The Search Requirements

Before you begin any search, it is important to analyze the specific requirements. This might seem to be an obvious point to you. However, this is a weighty factor when conducting a Boolean search for brand monitoring. Are you searching for the mentions of your company, your products or related products?

As a marketer or a PR executive, you definitely have different requirements. A Public Relations personnel wants to monitor complains and defamation statements online or on social media platforms. At the same time, a marketing executive might be interested in mentions of their brand. All these are different requirements.

Therefore, before you begin your search, you want to determine the goal. Then with the specific goal, you can determine the keywords and extent of your search. Basically, you should understand the requirements. Failure to, you will end up getting irrelevant mentions that are not useful to your brand monitoring campaigns.

1. Make Sure You Are Aware of Variations of Keywords While Conducting Your Search

While building a Boolean search for your brand monitoring efforts, how keywords can be expressed is commonly overlooked. The first thing you need to be aware of is what it is you want to monitor. For instance, you can monitor mentions of your company name, the different products within your company, or even a combination of both and several other parameters. So, in which ways can these be expressed? What are the possible variations while conducting a search? These are very basic questions you shouldn’t overlook while conducting any search. There are several example ways through which you can base your variations. They can be based on the following:

• Plurals

This is one of the most basic keyword variations in any search. Clients will include plurals in their keywords, and therefore, you should be keen not to miss these in your search. Unfortunately, not all brand monitoring tools will give you the power required for singular and plural keywords. Does your brand monitoring tool support singular and plural variations? If it doesn’t, you are missing dozens of high potential searches. Please confirm whether it does.

• Be Aware of Use of Multiple Words While Describing the Same Item

Do you know the different names that customers can use while searching for your products? What about the competitor products that you don’t want to appear in your search or vice-versa? For instance, a company selling clothes and wants to monitor mentions of their new line of denim pants. Clients can search using different wording. For example, the label on their denim jeans, blue jeans, knickers, blue jeans, pants, and many other names. Which one of these would you want to focus on? Which words are not helpful to you? Basically, it is very important to be aware of the possible words that your potential clients use while searching.

• What about Possible Abbreviations?

By now, you know that people conducting searches don’t have all the time to type the whole name. Therefore, the use of abbreviations is very common in online searches. For instance, while searching for places to eat in New York City, the client might search for Eat in NYC. Products and brands can also be abbreviated. For instance, IBM is an abbreviation for International Business Machines. BA is a common abbreviation for British Airways

• Nicknames

Another common variation to observe is the different nicknames. For instance, Manchester United Football club is commonly referred to as the Red Devils. Chelsea football club is referred to as The Blues in the football world. Are you aware of all possible nicknames people referring to your brand use?

• Misspellings

Not all clients will spell your brand name or products accurately. Quite a good number of online searches use misspelled keywords. Is your brand monitoring tool intelligent enough to identify these misspelled words? In some cases, the misspelling is intentional. For instance, in an effort to meet the Twitter character limit, people who want to mention your brand might intentionally spell your product wrongly. Can your brand monitoring tool identify this effectively?

Therefore, when using Keywords in your search, you need to be aware of the above. The brand monitoring tool you are using should be able to take care of the different variations. Read more about the use of Keywords when conducting a Boolean search here.

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