In today’s busy world, sometimes it’s hard to keep up with every single news out there. Keeping up with news about your company is no different. No matter if your company is big or small, having the right information at the right time is crucial.
If you’re using media monitoring, you’re already on the right track. To make the best out of your media monitoring experience, you should turn on your alerts and digests.
Alerts and digests help you keep track of your mentions on a day to day basis. You don’t need to have both features on, but we recommend doing so.
In this blog, we’ll cover each feature in-depth. Let’s start with the alerts!
Alerts
To put it simply, alerts are real-time notifications you receive every time a new mention of your brand (or whichever other keywords you’re tracking) appears online.
You can receive them on your email, Slack, or mobile app.
With alerts turned on, you won’t have to worry about missing a mention even if you’re not logged in the tool.
If you notice the number of negative mentions is growing, you might have a crisis brewing before your eyes.
According to Forbes, you have 15 minutes to respond to a crisis. With alerts, no minute will go wasted, because you’ll know something is not right the second the crisis starts brewing.
Your colleagues who don’t use the tool on a daily basis can also receive alerts. That can help them stay in the loop, as well. The great thing about this feature is that it’s highly customizable. You can turn them on during office hours, and silence them during off-hours and weekends.
Setting up alerts
Setting up alerts takes a minute or two.
First, you need to select the user that you want to receive alerts and add a new alert.
Then, you need to select the feed source (folder or query/queries) for which you want to receive alerts. The next step is to select where you want to receive your alerts.
If you want to receive alerts on Slack, make sure you’ve integrated your account with Determ.
On the next step, you can choose when you want to stop receiving alerts.
In the picture below, you can see that we’ve set up that we don’t want to receive alerts during off-time and weekends. But, you can customize it whichever way suits you best.
Besides silencing alerts, you can also snooze them for a while (e.g. if you’re on a vacation). Keep in mind that if you choose the Snooze option, you won’t receive alerts any alert about mentions that appeared in that period.
On the other hand, if you’re attending an important meeting for an hour or two, and don’t want to be disturbed during that time, you can silent your alerts, and opt to receive them when the silent period ends. You can do so by selecting Delay alerts on silent.
If you don’t want to receive alerts every time someone, for example, retweets the same post, you can select Discard similars. That way you’ll reduce the number of the alerts you receive, but you might miss out on tweets that are getting the most attention relating to your brand.
There’s also an option that allows you to set a limit to the number of alerts you receive per hour.
By clicking on the Reached limit you will be able to set the number of alerts per hour you wish to receive. You can choose from Unlimited, 5, 10, 25, 50, 75, or 100 alerts per hour.
For example, if you choose to receive 5 alerts per hour, and your brand has 10 mentions in that hour, you’ll receive alerts for the first 5 mentions only. This option is great if you don’t want to get overwhelmed with alerts, but still want to know what’s going on.
“In our business, speed of reaction is the key to success. The person who possesses the information first, possess the advantage as well – Determ helps you achieve that.”
Krešimir Macan, an expert in public relations and Director at Manjgura d.o.o.
Managing alerts
If you don’t want to receive alerts for a specific query anymore, you can easily remove them. Go to the Alerts section in the main toolbar, and there you’ll find all of your scheduled alerts. From there, you can edit your alerts, duplicate them or remove them.
Digests
Digests are overviews of your mentions.
They are a great alternative to alerts if you prefer receiving all your mentions from a specific period in one email or a file instead of receiving individual emails for every mention.
For example, you can schedule to receive your digests every workday at 8 AM. That way you’ll be able to go through your mentions from the previous day, detect the topics and questions that were mentioned the most, and set the agenda for the upcoming day.
Scheduling digests
Digests are also highly customizable.
You can schedule digests on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. There’s also a custom option that allows you to schedule your digests for specific days of the week.
Digests can be sent to you as a list in an email and are also available in Excel, PDF, and Word format. You can also choose to receive your digests in a report format by selecting the Report PDF option.
In the video below, check out a short tutorial on how to set up a weekly digest in Excel format.
At the very end of setting up digests, you’ll notice four options you can choose from.
The first one is Merge with other digests. This option is useful if you have other digests set up at the same time because you can merge them together in one email.
This is another way you can limit the number of emails you’re receiving and have all of the essential information in one place.
Discard similar mentions is the same option as in alerts. With it, you’re removing the possibility that the same mention is shown multiple times in digests (e. g. retweets of the same post).
If you want to get notified even when there were no new mentions in the timeframe you selected, choose the Notify when no mentions option.
Digests can be snoozed, as well. If you choose the Snooze option, the tool will pause sending you digests until you turn the snooze off.
Managing digests
You can access your digests through the Digest section on the main toolbar where you’ll be able to see all of your scheduled digests.
From there, you’ll be able to edit, duplicate, or remove your digests.
Setting up alerts & digests for your colleagues
Even though some of your colleagues don’t actively use the tool, you can still schedule alerts and digests for them.
You can do so by choosing the user who’ll receive alerts and/or digests in the upper right corner, before clicking on Add new Digest or Add new alert.
Make sure you’ve added the colleague to your organization in the tool beforehand.
To sum up
While alerts will notify you every time a new mention appears, digests will provide you with an overview of your mentions in a chosen timeframe.
Having the right information at the right time is essential. Enabling these features will help you always be in the loop and never miss out on important mentions.