Microsoft Social Listening – Create a Search Query

Jared Johnson, 23 September 2014

One of the most useful features of Microsoft’s new Social Listening product is the ability to generate a search query. This lets you retrieve mentions of your chosen topic from blogs, facebook posts, twitter posts and news articles and then pull them in to perform analysis on.

To create a new search query, navigate to the Settings area from the nav bar and then to Search Topics. This will display the Your Search Topics page, topics are a way to group search queries, for instance a Microsoft search topic might include queries for mentions of Microsoft, but also the names of different Microsoft products or Microsoft employees.

To create a new topic click the Add search topic button. Here you can name the search topic and also choose a Search topic category. This allows you to group different topics together, e.g. grouping all results about competitors together for viewing on a dashboard in CRM.

Clicking Add search query allows us to add a new search query, for this example we will search for posts about CRM. Type CRM into the keywords section, this is what the query will search for. In the sources and languages sections, we can choose which sources and languages we wish to search against, in this example we will retrieve results from all English sources.

Once the query is ready click the Test query button. This will give an estimate of how many posts the query will return in a month and only allow its creation if it does not exceed the post quota. In this case a search for CRM returns over 100000 results which is far too many.

This is where the Inclusions and Exclusions sections come in. These can narrow down the search results to exclude results we don’t want or only include certain results. For example adding Salesforce to the Exclusions section removes posts that include Salesforce. This brings the results down to 103,032, still not enough. Instead we can add Dynamics to the Inclusions box and select the sentence radio button. This will ensure that the query will only select posts that include CRM and Dynamics in the same sentence. After testing this, the results are now down to 9253 posts, as this is within our limits we can now close the query and save the topic.



Now that our topic has been saved, Social Listening will start pulling in results based on our query. Here is the results of the query we just made after several days: