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How to use required or excluded keywords?
How to use required or excluded keywords?

How can I narrow down number of results?

Updated over 11 months ago

This one's easy, I promise!
But just to ensure we're all on the same page - I've created some easy-to-understand examples below - on how to make the most of your advanced project settings.

Let's start with a super basic example, you've been tasked with finding everyone online talking about 'Apple'.

Your project settings should look like this:

With this setup, we'll collect everyone talking about 'Apple', but that might also include people eating the delicious fruit🍏

So we'll have to restrict the search a little - to make sure that we're focusing on what we actually want to see, which is people discussing the American IT company.

The easiest way to do this would be to include the required keyword 'mac' (e.g., Apple Mac - their flagship product).
With this in mind - the setup should look like this (the size of the letters doesn't matter):

But what about if you want to look at both Apple Macs and Apple iPhones in the same project?

To do this, you'll need to create a new line and add the required keyword like the one below:

Using the setup shown above ^, you will ask your Brand24 project to collect people mentioning the terms 'Apple & Mac' or 'Apple & iPhone'. Ensuring that you get everyone discussing these Apple products.

One additional thing to consider here is that by inputting these terms into the required keywords section, you're asking the tool to collect posts that include them anywhere in a single post. (e.g., ''I love Apple products, but I really don't like the latest Mac'' or ''I hate Apple products, especially the iPhone'')

You can limit your search even further by including these terms next to your main keyword, like below:

This will let your Brand24 project know that you only want to collect posts that include these terms when they appear next to each other (e.g., ''I the Apple Mac, it's great!'' or ''I hate the Apple iPhone, it sucks'') 

Make sense? 

What you would probably want to avoid:

The setup above would mean that you are asking your Brand24 project to only collect mentions of posts that include all three keywords - meaning a post would have to include 'Apple & Mac & iPhone'. But no worries, we will remind you of it:

With this in mind, the same logic applies to 'Excluded keywords' - the more keywords you include there, the more limited your results will be.

This is great if you are running a very specific campaign or your business name is typically used alongside a set of keywords. 

Hopefully, that clears that up for you! But if you have any other questions, feel free to contact our live Customer Success team, we will be more than happy to help you set your project up.

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