Did You Know? How to perform advanced searches in Social Monitor

Raven recently released new social tools, including a completely ravamped Social Monitor (found at Social > Monitor). Powered with data from uberVu, it taps into millions of conversations on more than 20 social networks—including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and WordPress—to display up to 1,000 results per day.

To help you receive results relevant to your research, Social Monitor allows for two Boolean search operators when creating searches: OR and – (the minus sign). The AND operator is implied by a space left between keywords and should not be used (use wool scarf instead of wool AND scarf). You can also use quotation marks to retrieve results for an exact phrase.

For example:

“The Office” will return results that include both keywords “the” and “office” in that exact order.

“Justin Bieber” horrible will return results that include the phrase “Justin Bieber” as well as the keyword “horrible.”

“SEO tools” OR “search engine optimization” will return results that include either the phrase “SEO tools” or the phrase “search engine optimization”

Raven -Baltimore will return results that include the keyword “Raven” but that omit the keyword “Baltimore.”

game “Playstation 3″ OR “Xbox 360″ -Nintendo will return results that include the keyword “game” with either the phrase “Playstation 3″ or the phrase “Xbox 360,” but not the keyword “Nintendo.”

Tips:

• Social searches cannot exceed 200 characters.
• Each social search is limited to five uses of the OR operator. For example: dog OR cat OR monkey OR fish OR panda OR moose
• Results from before the social search was created will not be returned. If you created a social search for “Skyrim is awesome” on Jan. 10, Social Monitor will not return results from before this date.