This help center article is designed to assist with answering the most common questions users have when using Radarly.

Table of contents:

The Radarly Academy is where you'll find all the resources you need to become a Radarly expert and learn all the benefits of Social Intelligence.

Thanks to the Academy, you will access Learning Paths teaching you all you need to know about Social Intelligence. Each learning Path should take around 30 minutes to achieve and deliver you a certification for your newly acquired skills.

The Academy delivers a large variety of Learning Paths constantly updated to teach you Radarly skills through different use cases from Reputation monitoring to Benchmarking or Influencer Monitoring.

You can access the Radarly Academy at the following address: https://academy.meltwater.com/pages/radarly-academy or through the question mark icon at the top right of your Radarly page.

For any questions or issues related to the Academy, please send an email to academy@meltwater.com.

Only administrators have access to the settings to add a new user.

Go to the settings of your project, click on "Users".

Then click on the + button to add a user.

Fill in the different information needed to create the new user:

1. Email address
2. The role, or access level of user
3. Available workspaces to the user

Note:
It is indispensable to add the user to one or more workspaces otherwise an error message will be displayed during the connection.

More information on the different user access levels.

After creating a query, you must perform a specific operation from the settings of your project workspace in order to display the query.
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Be aware of the technical limitation that one workspace in Radarly can only display up to 20 queries.
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More information about how to organize your dashboards.

You can plug your social accounts directly into Radarly. Just go through the settings of your project.
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Then you need to display the connected accounts by attaching them to your workspace as shown here: How to organize your dashboards?

Yes, you can compare earned vs. owned post.

The listening part of Radarly allows you to analyze the "earned media", that is to say, the posts on the web that quote your brand or the subjects that affect you.

In the filter bar, you can check the "other" box to exclude publications that come from your social accounts, plugged into Radarly.

To improve the quality of your analysis one step further, you can choose to exclude a list of authors.

Doing so allows you to exclude the posts by people in-house or the posts of your ambassadors, so you will know the real volume of the external benefits (earned).

Take Nike as an example, it would like to follow the volume of spin-offs on his brand associated with tennis on INSTAGRAM in French, excluding the messages published by the official accounts of the sponsored tennis players.

1. Create a corpus to organize the authors you would like to exclude from your project.

example of Nike: it creates a corpus that gathers the accounts INSTAGRAM of the athletes concerned.

2. Create a search query to capture posts that mention your brand or subject (s) that concern you.

> Also read: create a search query

Example of Nike: Nike: it creates a search query with its name associated with tennis with a filter on the French language and the platform Instagram.

3. Create a search query to capture all the posts that come from the authors to exclude, regardless of the topics by applying a corpus filter without any keyword.

Example of Nike: it creates a query with the "sponsored athletes corpus" filter, without any keyword

4. Create a focus query which includes the search query with the brand name and does not include the posts of the corpus.

Example of Nike: it creates a focus query which includes the posts from the search query "Source query NIKE" and excludes the results from the search query "Source query CORPUS"

5. Add the focus query to your Dashboard

Example of Nike: It adds the focus query "Nike Tennis without sponsoring" to its dashboard "Nike Sports"

NOTE: This operation is also possible using the list of influencers rather than corpus

Note:

To go further, discover our article about How to distinguish Owned vs Earned data.

The specific operator below allows you to bound Radarly publications to hours within dates.

To use it just paste the line below in the Radarly filter bar and change the dates and times accordingly.

Attention, the hours are in UTC.

The wordcloud displays the most used words among the posts, included hashtags, mentions, and named entities. It is a stylized way of visually representing occurrences of words used to described tags. The more recurrent the keyword is, the larger it will be.

Definitions:

- Keywords : attributes generated automatically (triggers) & manually (tagging manually)
- Hashtags : hashtags twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Sinaweibo, preceded by "#"
- Named Entities : entities auto generated by an algorithm.
- Mentions : mentions Twitter and Instagram, preceded by "@"

Yes you can, to do so, please use the operators below:

NOT (_exists_:facebook.in-reply-to-status-id AND user.facebook.id:[numerical account ID])

NOT (_exists_:twitter.in-reply-to-status-id AND author:[@screenname of your account])

When there is a syntax error in your query, you cannot update it. The most common syntax errors are:

This type of error is common when using software such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel to create queries. That's why we recommend using a word processor without formatting, such as Notepad ++ or Sublime Text.

These tools will allow you to have a better visualization of your queries and have a lot of advantages over Word, besides the fact that you will not encounter these problems with quotation marks and brackets/orphaned quotation marks.

Of course. However, you should not jointly use NEAR and raw or rawer. It is a technically impossible combination.

To get around this limit, 2 solutions are available to you:

In addition, NEAR is incompatible with special characters, especially @ and #.

To work around this limit, you can replace the NEAR with an AND, or remove these special characters from the query.

When creating a query, you have a preview of the results and the volume in the column on the right of your screen. The content and quantity of the preview rely on the results of our servers last month.

To build the overview, Radarly looks for publications that respond to your query, among all the publications captured by all Radarly projects running last 30 days.

This overview is therefore not exhaustive: the variation between the actual volume and that indicated by the overview may be high or low depending on the needs of all the customers.

How to use the preview?

The preview lets you know if your query captures a volume of data disproportionate to the overall size of your project (a query that is too general, polysemic, etc.).

It also allows you to see if there are any errors in your query (the building of the query, use of operators, managing of parentheses, etc.) or filters (for languages filters in particular)..

More details on the queries.

Queries only start capturing posts after they are created.

The posts you saw in the settings are the documents that Radarly has retrieved in the last 30 days.

In order to see the data, you need immediately, at the time of creating a query, choose to search the data in the past.

More details on the Analytics Details page.

The posts of an influencer group are captured by search queries in your project. You can create the influencer group only after their first posts enter your project. All the posts by influencer group members have to match one of your search queries.

On the contrary, a corpus contains a group of authors that you predefined and would like to monitor proactively. For Twitter and Sina Weibo, even an author in a corpus publishes content that does not include the keywords in your search query, their posts are still possible to still enter your project.

It is probable that a mismatch of platforms has caused this issue. Pay attention that you have selected the same platforms in your query with those in the corpus.

The Reach of a publication represents the estimated number of users exposed to the publication.

The reach is estimated as follows:

For social media:

For websites:

Since the information provided is a brief audience number, we have to make an assumption: for a single article, the times of visits and the number of visitors are the same (a visitor rarely reads the same article several times). The challenge of this method is how to distinguish between the exposure rate and the real reading rate.

For editorial sites such as media, blogs, we use the “bounce rate” to adjust the audience number. The bounce rate excludes the visitors who have not taken enough time to read an article on the web page after the publication, the shorter the visitors stay, the higher the bounce rate.

The detailed data is not as well listened as that of the website owners. To calculate the estimated reach of websites, we divide the web into three groups: Media, Blog and other websites. The bounce rate of media sites is known to be very low: visitors are the audience (95% of reach). Blogs are in an intermediate situation (40% of reach, assumed).

The audience to reach rate is very low (5%) for the rest of the websites, highlighting two behaviors:

The impressions of a message represent the total potential audience, the maximum number of people that can be exposed to the post.

Impressions are estimated differently for different platforms:

You are able to calculate Website Impressions with the formula:

Average traffic / Average number of published pages

Steps to find these elements:

Example calculation:

1,534,040 / (4,201 / 3) = 1,095

We do collect audience metrics for several millions of websites, in the case we do not have an audience information, we have built a statistical model to infer the audience of the source and the impression of the post. We use all the data set of urls, page ranks and audiences and we define an estimated Impression level based on the relationship between web site page rank and it's audience.

Our sentiment detection is constantly improving, by adding new languages every year. Today, Radarly covers 204 languages

- Italian
- Portuguese
- Dutch
- Russian
- Polish
- Indonesian
- Hindu
- Thai
- Swedish
- Arabic
- Japanese
- Korean
- Traditional Chinese
- Turkish
- Catalan

There are several ways to exclude an author from Radarly.
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If you want to exclude the posts from your social accounts, simply check the "other" box in the filter bar (in the case where social accounts "Owned" are connected in Radarly).

To go further and improve the quality of your analysis, you can choose to exclude a list of authors.
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Finally, to block a specific source (a website, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, etc.) and thus delete all its contents (for the past and future), just click on the post in Radarly to open the description of the source concerned and click on the three small dots on the right before clicking on 'block this influencer'.
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​Note: blocking an author in the listening part of Radarly will also impact the Social Performance section of the tool.

There are 3 possible reasons:

1. Your query is too restrictive and cannot capture the posts in question

You can modify your query in Radarly Settings

2. Your query contains a syntax error

Please modify your query following our advice.

3. Your post is not in Radarly's archived data.

When you request a search for data in the past, we search through all the posts captured by all of Radarly's active projects over the requested period.

If a post does not appear in your project after the request while it matches your query, it means that it was not captured among active Radarly projects during that time.

Regarding the threshold, it really depends on your subject, its popularity, and especially Web users who talk about it.

We advise you to proceed iteratively starting from a rather low threshold and increasing it as you go until the reassembled messages correspond to your expectations.

More details on alerts.

It is probably caused by the anti-pop-up mechanism of your browser.

When creating a Powerpoint report, you have to authorize the pop up of the Radarly webpage, so that it can send the downloadable link of the report to your computer.

As a result, when you face the problem, we recommend you to authorize the pop-up of your navigator and relaunch the report builder.

For the recurring automatic reports, you can only customize very limited elements (banner colors, logo, subtitles). It is not yet possible to customize other elements such as charts or indicators that are not included by default.

However, you can choose to include only the slides that interest you via the Report Builder.

Coverage Review can support up to 500 posts.

Radarly collects the statistics based on the posts from a Benchmark page or account, so if a Benchmark does not publish anything after being added to the Benchmark list, its statistics will not enter the project.

The best way to know if we pick up a source is to ask us by mail help@meltwater.com.

As soon as a query is implemented in a project, the posts that match the request are captured in real time, when they are published on social networks.

On the other hand, there may be some lags for Blogs / Media / Site (because of the RSS feed verification that takes time or delay in one of our suppliers for forums ...)

No. Radarly takes into account the original posts.

Posts are captured and indexed once they matched one of our queries.

As a conclusion, Radarly does not update these publications once indexing is done.

In order to capture a post, one or several keywords in search queries have to be mentioned in the text of the post.

If a post includes a link and the preview of the linked article includes one or several keywords in search queries, the post will be captured. Please note that this method does NOT work on Twitter or Sina Weibo posts.

To go further and understand the metrics available for this platform, check out our article about how Radarly collects data.

For owned accounts, we capture all the comments on your Facebook pages. For accounts in the Benchmark, we only capture part of the comments on the pages.

So yes, it is possible to crawl ALL the comments of a Facebook post, but the post has to meet the conditions below:

- It is a post from a Facebook page plugged into 'My Accounts' in the social performance section

- There is a dedicated query for the post.

Please note that we cannot prepare to capture the comments of a post in advance, because we need the post ID to capture its comments, and a post ID is only available after it is posted.

To display and analyze a series of Facebook posts and their comments you can use, in a focus query, the operator facebook.in-reply-to-status-id:[Facebook Post ID].

For the moment, we cannot capture Facebook reviews from Facebook pages.

Radarly captures a Facebook post when the post matches a search query and is published on the observed Facebook page.

That is why Radarly does not capture dark posts, also called sponsored posts, promoted posts or Facebook Ads because they do not appear on the observed Facebook page.

For other types of hidden posts such as hidden boosted posts or a post visible for one country but invisible for another, Radarly has access to them, because they have appeared on the page once.

Please note that the software does not distinguish between a post visible on the page and a post not.

Facebook has a different way of calculating the Reach, not calling it 'Estimated Reach' because they strictly take into account the number of times a post appears in the users feed.

In Radarly, we call it "Estimated Reach" because it is calculated based on the formula: Estimated Reach = Impressions (number of fans at the moment of posting) x 0.07

More information about the main KPIs in Radarly.

Within Radarly, the Social Performance and the Listening sections are separated. It means that Radarly can't import owned data within the Listening section as the data you have in the Social Perf is linked to your own credentials.

Listening:

The Estimated Reach of each post in Radarly is being calculated based on the number of followers of the global pages. Radarly cannot apply the local page metrics to the Listening section because the local number of fans is not exposed on the Facebook user interface. Even if you switch region, Facebook still only displays the overall number of followers.

Social Performance:

For the owned pages plugged in the Social Performance section, Radarly receives the information of the global pages and local pages directly from Facebook API.

For Benchmark pages, Facebook only displays information such as the number of followers of the global page as a whole.

To summarize:

Listening = Global Facebook page metrics
​Social Performance = Local Facebook page metrics (if pages plugged are in Radarly)

Radarly allows you to capture the replies to a specific tweet. To do so, you need to plug the Twitter account into a corpus and build a search query on the corpus.

Once the tweets of that account have reached your Radarly project, you can pick the tweet you want and use a dedicated query to withdraw the replies to the specific tweet you want to track.

In order to capture a post, one or several keywords in search queries have to be mentioned in the text of the post.

To go further and understand the metrics available for this platform, check out our article about how Radarly collects data.

The data retrieval process for Facebook and Instagram is based on Facebook's API. Facebook have put in place, strict compliance rules that Radarly needs to respect in order to access its data. The API requires a user to plug in their owned Facebook and Instagram account into Radarly. This allows Radarly to retrieve Facebook and Instagram data on the behalf of the 'token' provided by your connected Instagram accounts.

Due to API restrictions, if your Instagram account is not plugged into Radarly, then you will not have the ability to understand the performance of your Instagram Stories. As you may already be aware, all Instagram Stories are only available for 24 hours. However, if your Instagram is plugged into Radarly, then you can access, retrieve and analyse your stories. Unfortunately, it is not possible to monitor the performance of a Instagram Story of an account which is not plugged.

From Facebook API, for all posts geolocation, geographic data is not available in Instagram API. Which means no geolocation on posts and no geo on bio for business and non-business accounts.

However, to be able to provide country geolocation for Business Profiles in Radarly, we have deduced geography on profile from their past geolocated posts (most frequent country).

This case may happen if:

When deleting hashtags amongst the 30 active ones, the hashtags in pending will automatically start to collect data (within the limit of 30 active hashtags).

As soon as the data collection started it is not in pending anymore and the green checkbox is activated.

Radarly allows you to add up to 30 hashtags for search per Instagram Business Account.

As a reminder, 30 hashtags = hashtags searched through Radarly + hashtags searched by other application.

Radarly can only capture Youtube videos and cannot get any comments.

The most important point is that to collect videos, query keywords have to match with the title or the description of the video (the first 150 characters only).

To go further and understand the metrics available for this platform, check out our article about how Radarly collects data.

Since YouTube compliance changes, the platform can no longer be combined with other social media platforms and derived or generic metrics are not permitted. That is why we decided to deprecate this platform in the Report builder feature.

The Sina Weibo estimated reach formula in Radarly is:

Impressions x 0.04.

Let’s explain, step by step, how this was estimated.

Impressions:

The impressions could be defined as the global audience, the maximum number of users that could see the post at the time of publication.

For Sina Weibo, impressions are calculated with the following formula:

Number of followers of the author at the posting moment +
(Number of reposts x Median number of followers)

The current Sina Weibo median number of followers is 152. Calculation based on the 160 Millions of Sina Weibo accounts in the Radarly database.

Estimated Reach:

The Estimated reach of a post is the estimated number of users exposed to the post at the moment it was published. The Estimated Reach calculation depends on the Impression value.

The Estimated Reach of a post = impressions of the post x web user's exposure coefficient

The Sina Weibo Estimated Reach formula in Radarly is:

Impressions x 0.04

How do we usually estimate the exposure coefficient ?

In most cases, we use the fact that our customers are plugging their owned social account in Radarly to make some reverse engineering and estimated an average ‘exposure coefficient’ based on exact ‘Reach’ metrics of owned brand's social accounts.

In the case of Sina Weibo for which we do not have Reach data in Owned Media analytics, we had two options: not provide an estimated reach or find proxies to get indicative values.

For some platform, we decided not to provide Estimated Reach when data is not available (ex: forums). For Sina Weibo, we decided to provide an estimation as owned channels provide relevant complementary KPIs that can help us estimate a value.

For a recap of the information about our methodology, please refer to the article The main metrics in Radarly.

In order to capture a post, one or several keywords in search queries have to be mentioned in the text of the post.

Attention, the comments that include the keywords are also counted as a post.

To go further and understand the metrics available for this platform, check out our article about how Radarly collects data.

Even though your project does not capture the comments specifically, if there are Weibo comments entering the global channel of Radarly (captured by other projects) and matching your project queries, they will enter your project.

The comments are counted as posts while the Sina Weibo forwards are considered as reposts.

To take the statistics of reposts into account, you have to select the Post+Repost unit, on the other hand, please note that forwards and comments are always visible in the posts list (whatever the unit is chosen).

If you want to learn more about what a repost is, check it out here.

As you might know, on Sina Weibo platform, there are many fans who love to forward posts from their favorite celebrities, you will see many posts like this when you browsing the post list in Radarly, by using this operator, it helps you to easily locate the user-generated contents from seas of forwards posts from celebrity fans.

You can remove them in different ways:

Yes, it is possible for Radarly to collect LinkedIn data. The data collection for this source started in January 2022.

Some KPIs are still not managed by Radarly such as the impressions, estimated reach, and engagement scores.

The media:

The "media" sites are manually qualified. This qualification concerns sites that also use offline support (press, TV, radio, etc.). It concerns the platforms which have a team dedicated to the writing of contents (conference of redaction, journalists, etc.) and whose main activity is the publication of contents.

Blogs:

To be qualified as a blog, a site must be thematized (general topics included) and have at most 2 authors.

By default platforms like WordPress, Overblog, Blogspot, etc. are qualified as blogs.

Websites:

The "website" is a collection of all other non-social media platforms and blogs that regroup brand sites, institutional sites, aggregation sites and so on.

We can retrieve media and websites comments. However, Radarly cannot guarantee exhaustivity on this type of posts. And for this reason, the comments of some articles are not displayed in Radarly.

💡 Tip

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