Location Filter vs Location as a Keyword
Hello mCommunity! I’m Julia, a member of the North American Implementation and Onboarding team, and I’m here to share some insight on a question that frequently gets asked on training sessions:
“What distinguishes using the location filter to narrow down to a specific country vs including the location as a keyword in a search query?”
Let’s dive into the differences and explore how they each function by using the movie BlackBerry as an example:
To begin, when using the location filter, you can get more granular by narrowing your focus to a particular state or province. Simply select the up arrow next to the country. For this scenario, I want to refine my search to retrieve results from Ontario, as most of the movie was filmed in Hamilton, ON. Applying the location filter will return results (both news and social content) solely from Ontario.
We can see from the screenshots above, this search has pulled back 23 results over the last 30 days with “Ontario” filtered as the location, from originally 877 results globally. In other words, the displayed results are exclusively from people who identify themselves from Ontario on social media or news outlets from the province.
Next, let’s look at adding Ontario as a keyword to your search query. By adding AND (“Ontario”) to this boolean string, the search results will now incorporate the keywords “Blackberry” near/8 keywords of “movie” and “Ontario”, (while eliminating any mentions of fruit). Essentially, the word Ontario must be present in all content within the results.
From the screenshot above, we can see this search has pulled back 35 results over the last 30 days. All results in the content stream include the added keyword “Ontario”.
Hot tip! Did you know that the keyword filter can be used as a shortcut? Adding “Ontario” to the keyword filter functions the same way as incorporating it into your boolean string.
In the screenshot above, we can see that including “Ontario” in the keyword filter has returned the same 35 results as the boolean example.
And there you have it! As always, if you have questions about this, share them in the comments below - and if you have other examples to share, I’d love to hear them!