Monitoring tools cannot find all relevant contents of web and social networks like Facebook.
Helpful: bookmark very interesting references and check them regularly.
Install Email alerts of search engines and RSS feeds of relevant assessment pages.
Many monitoring tools offer special crawling of certain fan pages or accounts.
COVERAGE OF SOURCES – A SPECIAL ATTRIBUTE
One of the few attributes that allow a valid comparison of monitoring tools is the coverage of sources. In their latest monitoring tool comparison Goldbach group has shown the coverage of sources right after the searching functions, as second important attribute. Interestingly all ten compared tools outperform standards according to the mark of Golbach. So, generally speaking this is OK and you can answer the chief bravely: “Everything.”?
Unfortunately it is not that simple. Even if crawlers dig deeper into the blogosphere and multilingual forums, evaluate the found content more intelligent and even if they are able to check more often through growing server capacity; nevertheless there are firm technical and juridical limits set to them. Depending on the industry, areas may be interesting in the Dark net, for market research purposes, such as for observation with the help of a tool. However this technically fails inpeer-to-peer-overlay-structure. Standard networks like Facebook and Google+ also present themselves at least partly juridically as dark web which forbids the access to crawler and even indexations. In practice this means that monitoring tools cannot find all relevant contents of web and social networks like Facebook. Under these presumed conditions monitoring tools are evaluated – however, this does not necessarily reflect the needs of users.
USEFUL ADDITION FOR THE PROFESSIONAL MONITORING TOOL
If you would like to reach an extensive coverage of sources, considering the raised limitations, there is no option to manual labour. To complete the results of the normal search of monitoring tools, depending on the type of contents that the tool couldn’t find and depending on the objectives, other measures are necessary. Many monitoring tools offer special crawling of certain fan pages or accounts, for example on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, what may be a complete coverage, at least for this determined space. However this often turns out to be incomplete, because networks do not allow – even if only in delimited areas – crawlers to enter. An exception here is Twitter.
In order to keep you as up to date as possible, for example for reputation protection, email alerts of search engines and RSS feeds of relevant assessment pages are provided. After the first weeks simple Google and Bing searches, where the tool has combed relevant keywords, are worthwhile to identify which relevant sites the tool has not or only partially covered. How to deal with the gathered information depends on the monitoring aim: One option is to find a way of coverage of not yet listed sites in assistance of the monitoring tool. A more time-consuming however safer way to not missing anything is to bookmark very interesting references and check them regularly. According to project and frequency of the reference this could happen on a daily, monthly or yearly basis.
MONITORING TOOLS AS TOOL IN A TOOL BOX
Even if the tool developers promise the opposite mantra-like – there is no really extensive monitoring tool that covers the whole web and all social networks. The more extensive the monitoring objective and the less vague the monitoring job, the harder it is to find and consequently to evaluate all relevant articles. The size of the required resources rises in time and the size of capable employees soon exponentially.
