Tool for journalists: Yatterbox, for social media monitoring

What is it? Social media monitoring tool which identifies key influencers across the media, politics and other important commentators.

How is it of use to journalists? Yatterbox is a free platform which allows journalists to generate alerts to track breaking news or follow topics and issues they are interested in.

However, the thing that makes Yatterbox stand out from other similar platforms is its ability to identify “key influencers” across media and politics.

To create an alert, click the 'plus' button at the top right of the home screen and input the keywords or phrases you would like to search for. You can also exclude certain words under advanced settings.

Next, choose which groups of social media users you would like to search, from British journalists to people working in UK and EU politics.


Screengrab from Yatterbox.com

You can narrow this down further using the 'see more options' tab. For example, the 'UK journalists' group can be broken down into national, regional and trade journalists.

These groups are manually curated by the Yatterbox team – the UK journalists group includes 20,000 users alone – and are updated regularly. Here is some more information on how these groups are created.

Yatterbox integrates with Twitter, Facebook YouTube, Google+ and Flickr, and you can choose to search all five networks or just one of them.

You can also set the frequency of email alerts – whether you want them to be instant, daily, weekly or monthly – or disable emails altogether if you prefer to log in to check alerts.

A particularly handy feature is that, as you're setting up an alert, Yatterbox will estimate the amount of emails you will get per day, so you can see in advance whether you're likely to be deluged or not.

Another useful function is the ability to generate reports around a certain topic.

For example, inputting the search term 'Ukraine' shows the volume of social posts featuring that keyword over the last five days, and by which groups.

You can also see the top hashtags and most active social accounts related to that keyword, and recent posts relating to that search.

Yatterbox features a home feed, similar to Twitter, where you can see all of your alerts as they come in.

Alerts are usually triggered within just a few seconds, and you can sort your home feed to show just results from one alert category, or show them all.

Yatterbox is optimised to work on mobile, tablet and desktop so you can create and access your alerts wherever you are.

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