Get started with Alerts
Whitney W. avatar
Written by Whitney W.
Updated over a week ago

Alerts automatically send key insights about your brand, competitors, or industry trends. We will walk through how first create and pause alerts. Next, will also go over the different type of alerts that can be set in your account and how they can be integrated.

Getting started

Types of alerts

Integrations


How to create an Alert

  1. Click on the Alerts tab in the navigation panel.

  2. Select the type of alert you'd like to create. Please see further details on each alert type within this article.

  3. Fill in the details required for your alert type

  4. Select how you'd like to receive your alert: Web/Mobile and Email

  5. You can choose if you'd like to set the alert for yourself or another user on your account

  6. Click Save

Alerts can be sent in-app on web or mobile, email, Teams, and Slack.

For more information on integrating Microsoft Teams or Slack with Meltwater, click below.

Access in-app alerts directly on the Homepage via a module that shows the newest content, located below the More from Meltwater promo card. This includes a 'mark as read' function to support being up-to-date after taking action. Alerts that appear on the Homepage will be considered Unread (remain bolded) until selected.

Types of Alerts include:


How to Pause an alert

Sometimes, you may not need an alert, but don't want to delete it. Instead, you can Pause your alert.

There are several ways to pause an alert.

  • Individually from the alerts table - hover over an alert, and find options to edit, delete, or pause your alert. If the alert is already paused, you will see the option to resume.

  • In bulk, from the alerts table - Check the boxes of the alerts you wish to pause, and see at the top the option to delete, or pause your alerts. When bulk pausing/resuming multiple alerts in mixed-status (some paused, some active), the only bulk option will be resume.

  • When editing an alert - when editing an alert, there is an option at the bottom to Pause Alert

Note: When pausing/resuming an alert, it will pause for all recipients and delivery methods.


Events

An Events alert is sent when Meltwater detects a high-impact business event (partnership, acquisition, headcount growth, etc.) for the companies you are following.

Events reduce the noise, by narrowing in on the most business-critical events that can be instantly actioned across all organization departments. Having full visibility into your business ecosystem gives you the power to be the informer.

What type of events can Meltwater detect?

Events will detect the following categories:

Event Group

Event

Award

Award

Conference Participation

Customer Win

High Profile Award

Brand Crisis

Civil Law

Criminal Law

Cyber Attack

PR Problem

Corporate

Acquisition

ESG

Intellectual Property

IPO

Merger

Quote

Restructuring

Strategy

Executive Change

Executive Appointment

Executive Departure

Executive Replacement

Financial

Fundraising

Insolvency

Neutral Financial Results

No Funding Anomaly

Overdue Funding Anomaly

Strong Financial Results

Weak Financial Results

Headcount

Capacity Expansion

Capacity Reduction

Headcount Growth

Headcount Reduction

Market Expansion

Marketing

Marketing Campaign

Launch

Partnership

Event Streak

High Profile Partnership

Partnership

Valuation Change

Valuation Change

Valuation Decrease

Valuation Increase

Filter Events alerts by type

When creating your alert, you may choose any combination of the events listed above to customize your alerts to only those events most relevant to your use case.

What type of content do Events track?

Events track content based on the following parameters:

  • Editorial content

  • Editorial sources must have a minimum reach of 1,000

  • English only

What are some examples of an Events alert?

Industry

Challenge

Event

Benefit

Healthcare

Remaining competitive in a rapidly changing industry.

Competitor announces a partnership with a courier company to use drone services to drop-off drugs and prescriptions.

Company received timely information and shifted strategy to remain competitive.

Automotive

Assessing competitive landscape while operating in a volatile market.

Industry leader slashes workforce amid corporate restructuring.

Competitor's recruitment team expedited their seasonal hiring campaign.

CPG

Low turnover highly skilled executives.

CMO departs from a competitor company.

Organization to poach a giant industry fish and add them to their C-suite.

Marketplace software

Strategic market expansion in a broad and complex global market.

Top competitor starts operations in Dubai.

Narrow global expansion to one region, and identify potential acquisition target.

Why haven't I received any Events alerts?

Events should be rare and actionable, so there is no guaranteed amount of 'Events' you will receive.

Why isn't the company I'm searching for appearing in the drop-down?

There are ~193,000 companies available for Events. If a company is not appearing or there is incorrect company information you have the option to "Provide Feedback" from within the platform.

You will receive updates on your feedback from our support team via email.


Spike Detection

A Spike Detection alert is sent when Meltwater detects that a search volume is much higher than your saved search’s baseline.

Social search baselines compare the last hour against the previous 12 hours of data. Editorial search baselines compare 1 day against the previous 14 days of data. To ensure the search results are a true anomaly, we check for fluctuations against the previous day and week before sending the alert.

Why Use Spike Detection?

This type of alert notifies you when there's an unusual change in volume regarding your specific search. It can help identify whether your brand, a competitor, or a topic is trending on social or has received wide news coverage. Receiving this information in a timely manner can help participate in social conversations as they happen, react to issues as they occur, stay informed regarding important topics, and help your overall PR or marketing strategies.

Here are some examples of Spike Detection:

  • The social mentions for a cosmetic brand averages 200 hits during Saturday afternoons. This is its current baseline. One Saturday afternoon its number of social mentions jumps to 500 within an hour. This alert will notify the user of this change.

  • Compared to the last two weeks, the news mentions about car safety features increased by 300% after an announcement by a major automotive manufacturer. This alert will notify the user of this change.

Why haven't I received any Spike Detection Alerts?

Spike Detection alerts only occur if there's an unusual spike in volume for your saved search.


Top Reach

A Top Reach alert is sent when a high-reaching editorial source mentions keywords for your saved search.

Alerts are sent when a mention scores much higher than your search’s baseline, which is calculated from the last 3 days of data or the first 20,000 mentions. Mentions are scored on the source’s reach.

Why use Top Reach alerts?

When influential sources mention your company, competitors, or industry, it can directly or indirectly impact your organization. The Top Reach alert allows you to stay on top of influential editorial sources that mention your keywords. Notify executive leadership if your company receives high reaching press coverage or tag these mentions to use in your reports.


Twitter Influencer

A Twitter Influencer alert is sent when a high-reaching Twitter source mentions keywords for your saved search.

Alerts are sent when a tweet scores much higher than your search’s baseline, which is calculated from the last 3 days of data or the first 20k mentions. Tweets are scored on the account’s engagement level and network size (number of tweets, follower count, and following count).

Why use Twitter Influencer alerts?

When influential Twitter handle mentions your company, competitors, or industry, it can directly or indirectly impact your organization. The Twitter Influencer alert allows you to stay on top of influential Twitter handles that mention your keywords. Engage with influencers who are mentioning you and potentially create new partnerships, understand what could cause your search terms to trend, and mitigate potential risks.

Pro tip: if an influencer mentions your brand, use Engage to track if your social profiles receive an increase in followers.


Every Mention

The Every Mentions Alert allows you to be notified when new search results come into a monitoring folder via email or mobile. These notifications can be configured for any of your Meltwater users to be recipients.

Alerts are sent each time a new mention appears in the selected search, with a maximum of 200 alerts sent each hour.

How to Set Up Every Mention Alerts

All Alerts, including Every Mention, are connected to your saved searches to send the latest results. Before creating a new Every Mention, please ensure you have saved the monitoring topics or keywords for which you would like to receive the media coverage.

  1. Select Content from the navigation bar on the left

  2. Select Alerts

  3. Select the purple Create Alert (if you do not see this, check your user settings)

  4. Report Type: select Every Mention

  5. Select an Input. Searches are available depending on the search filters that are enabled

  6. Select recipients. Choose who would you like to set up notifications for from the list of your users.

Protip: If you would like some recipients to have the alert delivery method of email and others via mobile, this can be done by setting up two different alerts

7. Select delivery method. If you'd like to receive alerts through Slack, learn more about connecting your account here

8. Select Save

Turn off Every Mention Alerts

When it comes time to end your Every Mention, you can simply delete the alert from your list. This can also be done for other users by adjusting the 'View Alerts for' dropdown.

Please note that when editing an Alert you can adjust the delivery method but not the inputs or recipients.

If you are turning off your instant notifications because the results are irrelevant, please reach out to our team via Live Chat for support in refining the search terms causing the relevant results.

Want Alerts but less frequently?

We recommend a Digest Report for one or twice daily email summaries of your search results, check out our dedicated article here.

Alternatively, you can customize your alerts based on the content rather than how often they are sent. Learn more about other alerts via our dedicated article here, these include options such as:

If you'd like to continue receiving Digest Reports but less frequently, please set up a new report which can be set to distribute at one of the following frequencies:


Sentiment Shift

Sentiment Shift can help you to understand the spikes and dips in your brand, industry, and competitor’s tonality. Think of sentiment shift similarly to spike detection; but instead of coverage volume, this alert is dictating changes in positive and negative sentiment compared to a standardized baseline.

Please note this isn't available within the Meltwater Lite or Meltwater Lite+ Engage packages.


Page Engagement

Page Engagement is sent when there is a significant engagement increase on your owned Facebook page.

Receive a Page Engagement alert when engagement volume with your posts on your owned Facebook page is significantly higher than your baseline. Engagements are defined as reactions, comments, shares, clicks, video views, etc. Engagement is compared on a rolling 7 day period, with metrics being calculated daily for the past 24 hours.

This alert type is only available to Engage and Social Analytics users.


Likely Boosted

Alerts are sent when a competitor's Facebook post is predicted to have been boosted to target audiences for a fee, based on the engagement (reactions, comments, and shares).

Explore customers who have authenticated a Facebook profile under monitored social connections, will be able to select up to 10 Facebook pages for boosted post monitoring.

Posts from monitored Facebook pages are checked for engagement updates every 6 hours for 7 days.

Likely Boosted alerts are only sent once per post.


Breakout Post

Alerts are sent when a post on your owned Facebook page has engagement (reactions, comments, and shares) higher than the average across all posts from that page over the last 7 days.

You must connect at least one Facebook page in order to see this alert option. Select up to 10 of your own connected Facebook pages for monitoring. Posts are checked every three hours, for 7 days and are measured against a rolling engagement for the page over the last 7 days.

The page requires daily engagements for a baseline.


System

System Alerts will notify you:

  • when an action has been completed, for example, a download has been completed

  • when a task has been assigned to you

  • When an owned or paid social account has disconnected

System Alerts are designed to be automatically 'turned on' for all users. You can opt-out of any alerts you don't wish to receive via the Alerts page, select System and deselect the alerts.

Types of System Alerts:

  • Assignments in Publish: Alert me when I have a new assigned, approved, rejected post or draft in Publish Engage

  • Downloads: Alert me when my CSV export files are ready

  • Social Account Connections: Alert me when my social accounts are close to expiration, expired, or invalid

    • Alerts/Emails are sent 10 days, 5 days, and 1 day before the expiration date, as well as on the day of expiration.

    • Alerts are triggered when a Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn owned connection, or Facebook and Instagram Paid connection, is about to expire, expired, or marked invalid.


Microsoft Teams

By enabling this integration right from the platform, you can begin receiving automated, AI-powered alerts sent directly to Teams. Click here to see how


Slack

By enabling this integration right from the platform, you can begin receiving automated, AI-powered alerts sent directly to Teams. Click here to see how


Sending to External Users

As of December 2021, you can now send Smart Alerts to external users (non-Meltwater users).

It used to be the case that Meltwater limited you to distributing alerts to emails associated with your account. Now, you can simply enter any email address you wish, like so

Important to note:

  • There’s added context in the email itself. For example:

  • External users can unsubscribe on their own within the email.

  • There is an external users dropdown in the Alerts table where you can manage all alerts for external users.


Turn on Mobile Push Notifications

Sending notifications through to your mobile rather than email can help to ensure you stay up to date with the latest news of importance to you while on the go. These notifications can be customized within your Mobile App to distribute coverage from selected search folders during your specified working hours.

  • Ensure you have the latest Meltwater mobile app from the App Store or Google Play store

  • Select Settings from the bottom navigation bar

  • Under notifications, any currently set up notifications will display '1 on' under the notification type. Select this to view your existing set-up

  • To create a new notification, select the type and 'Enable notifications'

To learn more, please review our How to Set Up Mobile Push Notifications article.

Ensure you've downloaded the latest version of the Meltwater Mobile app for your device. For Apple users, you can download the app via the App Store. For Android, you can download the app on Google Play.


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.


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