Filtering News by Reach Alongside the Topic: Operator
Hey mCommunity! Julia here from the North America Onboarding and Implementation team. A frequent question we hear from new clients during the initial stages of training and onboarding is, “how can I filter out irrelevant chatter in my brand search results while ensuring I receive quality hits?”
Whether you’re monitoring your own brand, a client, or a competitor, managing the volume of mentions can be daunting.
In this tip, I’ll guide you through using the topic operator combined with the news source filter to hone in on what matters most to you.
First off, while exclusionary keywords (using the NOT operator) or custom category exclusions can help eliminate certain topics like financial reports, stock mentions, or job postings, they often require some level of manual effort to sift through a sea of general or passive mentions to find the quality content you’re looking for.
In the below screenshot, despite applying language, location and news source type filters, we’re still getting over 2,000 mentions of National Geographic over the last 7 days.
Even after excluding stock mentions and press releases, trimming off approximately 800 mentions, we’ve still got over 1,000 mentions to sift through when looking for specific articles or topics.
Let’s explore another approach. Although we’ve already toggled on the ‘news’ source type filter, let’s get a bit more granular by layering news criteria such as reach.
While applying the top 10% reaching publications significantly trimmed our results down to 228, these mentions remain largely general and passive.
This is where the topic operator will help us drill into a more targeted topic. With hundreds of topics available in our complete boolean library, we’ll focus on topic:”wildlife” as it relates to National Geographic. As shown in the screenshot below, we now have 17 results aligning with our search intent.
If you decide not to filter news by reach, the topic operator remains extremely useful for pinpointing specific themes in coverage.
To further your efforts, consider leveraging Meltwater’s digest reports - concise summaries of coverage from a saved search, delivered directly to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis.
And there you have it! I’d love to hear about any other methods you’ve found effective or are currently utilizing in your day-to-day. Additionally, if you have suggestions for future product rookie tips, please feel free to share!
Warmly,
Julia