This is the first part in a series of posts detailing how to maximize your listening efforts by following the social media search cycle. This post will cover how to identify and refine your social media searches.

Here at Looxii we provide you with the social media listening tools needed to monitor brands (personal or professional), products, competitors or prospective clients. Social media content and subjects are constantly shifting; anything social is usually dynamic, even chaotic. Effective monitoring means accounting for this dynamic, and sometime chaotic, environment.

There are many steps in the life of a social media search and fine-tuning your searches saves time and ensures you are getting the most out of the social web.

Step 1: Identify/Refine Social Media Search Terms

Whether you are a P.R. firm tracking major brands or an organization with a smaller web presence, choosing the correct social media searches is the most fundamental decision to make.

High Volume Searches

If you are searching for terms that have large responses such as “iPod” or “Lady Gaga” it is helpful to identify sub categories. A search for “Lady Gaga” currently returns around 30,000+ mentions/day on Twitter alone. Tracking this term can be helpful only in regard to looking at volume (total mentions) over time. A more useful approach involves breaking your search into subcategories that become more manageable. A search for “Lady Gaga concert” returns around 250 tweets/day and “Lady Gaga tickets” about 160 Tweets/day. This is a small subsection of social media mentions, but if you choose the right categories you can gain insights into important aspects of a brand.

If you are running a search for a business, non-profit, or university, categories are important as well, but for smaller searches you can easily implement tags and tag groups which we will cover in the next post.

Getting Rid of Noise

Many search engines offer advanced search options which allow you to add, with ease, complexity to your search. Looxii offers two advanced search options detailed on our Getting Started page: the all words/exact words toggle and the exclude terms box.

Starting with the all words/exact words toggle and using the previous example, an all words search for “Lady Gaga” might return results like “I’m gaga over you, lady!” but the exact match will only return results like “I’m crazy about Lady Gaga” or “Lady Gaga rocks!” It’s important to decide if people will naturally tend say the term all together or if they tend to break it up. The term “Lady Gaga tickets” could be stated with different word orders, such as: “I need tickets to see Lady Gaga,” so all words would be the appropriate choice for this search.

The exclude terms box can be used to refine your search over time. After seeing the social media mentions over the course of a week or so, you should be able to tell which mentions are meaningless for your particular term. If you were searching for “Devo” and there were frequent Twitter mentions with “Download Devo torrents” we would want to add “torrents” to the excluded terms. The Looxii exclude terms box also excludes authors, so if you are running a smaller search and you have a certain author (e.g. “@spambot-7443″) that always posts worthless mentions containing your search term, add their name (e.g. “spambot-7443″) to the excluded terms.

What’s Next?

Properly setting up your terms is only the first step in tracking social media. In the following posts we will cover how to choose important conversations, categorize mentions, generate reports, and take action. This is an on-going process, you won’t want to set it and forget it. Repeat step one until you have nicely refined searches that generate meaningful social media insights.