Advanced Filtering

Why should you use filters?

People use social media to post about all kinds of stuff. Filters help you separate the signal from the noise to make your feeds more relevant. They can also be used to make sure content you don't want never makes it in to your feeds. Getting the most out of filters can require a little bit of creativity on your part, but once finely-tuned, they can be extremely useful and time saving.

There are several types of filters:

• Text Include filters - rules for what words must be used in order for an update to make it in to the feed
• Text Exclude filters - rules for what words must NOT be used - essentially a blacklist of words or phrases you don't want to let in
• Geo filter - require geo-coordinate (latitude and longitude) to be set - this enables you to plot updates on a map
• Media filters - rules based on the inclusion of photos, videos, and links (e.g. send anything with a photo to the moderator)
• Twitter-specific filters - rules based on Twitter behaviors including retweet and @reply

You can add as many include and exclude filters as you like.add an include filter and/or an exclude filter to each Author Group or Search Topic in your account. You only get one include and one exclude filter per author/topic, but the syntax used to write filters gives you all the flexibility you should need within those two filters.

Filter actions

Filters can either be used to automatically "hide" a piece of content - removing it from the live feed - or they can be used to send a piece of content to the moderator.

For example, you might want to always remove curse words from the feed, but if someone says the name of a competitor, you could want to have a moderator review it before making it live.

Filter syntax guide

Our filter syntax is designed to be easy to use without having to read any instructions (like these) but to also provide advanced features that give you extra power if you need it and want to learn how to use it. Here are a few of the basic rules to keep in mind:

• "and" and "or" are your two magic words - they do what you would expect
• Groups of words enclosed in quotations will force a match on the entire phrase
• Parenthesis can be used to form complex logic tests: "social" and ("media" or "curation" or "marketing")
• We follow standard order of operations rules when evaluating combinations of and/or operators
• Punctuation and uppercase/lowercase are ignored - so "social!" will match "social."
• # and @ are treated as letters rather than punctuation - so "#feedmagnet" will not match "@feedmagnet"
• Partial word matches happen automatically - so "market" will match "marketing"

Auto-correction

When you edit the text of a filter, we will attempt to make sense of what you've written. If you haven't entered the syntax just the way we like it, we'll edit for you automatically. Here's why this is usually a good thing:

• By putting things in a standard format, there is no room for ambiguity as to what was meant
• You can see the changes we make as soon as you click out of the edit box, so there is immediate feedback

Most of the time we understand want you meant and get the edits right. For example, social, curation, aggregation, marketing becomes "social" or "curation" or "aggregation" or "marketing"