First, you will need to access the Pulse module within Primer Command. You can do so by scrolling down on the home page to the Go to Pulse button, or you can navigate to the Pulse landing page by selecting the icon on the navigation on the left-hand side of the screen.
How to Create a Monitor
From the Pulse landing page, to create a monitor, click + Add a Monitor in the top right hand corner of your screen. You will then be brought to this page:
First, create a name for your monitor.
Choose whether you would like the monitoring to stop if you don’t open Pulse after seven days. The default is set to stop background collection after seven days of inactivity, but you can disable that feature if you'd like.
Select your data sources
Under the "Included Terms" section specify what terms or phrases you'd like to search for. These search terms will apply to both the news and the social media sites you've selected.
Simply type a word that you’re interested in (it can be anything from keywords to hashtags to usernames of specific social media accounts) and then click enter.
To search on an exact phrase, ex: "Joe Biden", please use quotation marks:
"Joe Biden". If you do not utilize quotation marks, ex:Joe Biden, the monitor will search for any post or news article containingJoeANDBiden.
In the "combined with all of these term" section, you can add terms that need to appear in conjunction with the initial term(s). Ex: If your initial included terms are
president,election, adding"Joe Biden"as a combined term will return results that contain eitherpresidentORelection, AND"Joe Biden"Please note: There is a 1,000 word maximum for computed terms in a monitor. For example, you can add 1,000 terms to the "any of these terms" bucket. If you use the "combined with any of these terms (optional) bucket, the combined terms will act as a multiplier. In the example below, there are 6 computed terms:
Please note: The terms buckets do not utilize stemming, so please include all variations of the terms you would like to see in your monitor. In the example above, you may want to include indictments, indicted, etc.
Please note: If you are using terms separated by a colon (
:) please wrap the term in quotation marks, ex: "321:123"
Select the "add group" button to include additional sets of terms.
Adding "Excluded Terms"will exclude any results that contain those terms.
You can apply a geofence to your search. This feature will restrict the social media & news results to only those either geotagged or mentioning a location within the geofenced area.This helps reduce noise and focus search results on a geographic area of interest.
Results are first returned based on the query terms, then are further narrowed down based on mentioned or geotagged locations from these results - which fall within the geofence area.
For example if a user searched on “flood AND (damage or destroyed)”, then set a geofence over a region across the Queensland and New South Wales border in Australia - results will only be surfaced if they mention a location somewhere in this region, or are geotagged to this area (and they mention the search terms).
It is important to note that most social media posts on Twitter do NOT have a geolocation assigned, so the majority of tweets that appear will be because a location was mentioned. Here's how to create a geofence:
Define Geofence
You can either search for a known specific location - like a town, or landmark or drop a Custom Location on the map (Click Custom Location).
Type the location name into the Find location box - the map will zoom to the location, and a marker will be dropped for a center point. You can also enter a lat/long in decimal degrees into this box (format example: 37.7687, -122.3875)
Alternatively, you can zoom and scroll in on the map, and use “Custom Location” to drop a marker wherever they like
A search radius will appear by default with each marker - the size of this radius will depend on the scale of the location searched (e.g. Arizona v Eiffel Tower), and/or the zoom level.
The radius of the search area can easily be adjusted by hovering on the circle - a small marker will appear on the edge which can be dragged in and out to make the radius larger or smaller:
Alternatively, you can click on the map marker - and a small text box will appear where a radius can be manually entered.
The text box allows you to label the location with a name:
Each location marker will create an entry in a table beneath the map - showing how many geofences your search includes. The user can click on a Location from the table and the map will zoom to that marker.
To remove a geofence - click on the marker, and select “Remove Location”
Geofence Pro-Tip: When the results for a monitor loads, the map populated with news and social posts will likely contain many locations highlighted outside of your geofenced area. This is because for each article or tweet - every location mentioned or tagged is assigned to that event or post. So if there is an article about Donetsk in Ukraine, attributed in the article text to an author in Cape Town, South Africa - you will get both of those locations marked on the map for that article. Note: Geotagged tweets will appear as blue markers.
Once you click ‘Save & Run Monitor’, your query will be running in the background
Separating news and social media terms
If you want an even more detailed search, you can click separate your news and social media terms by selecting the toggle under "Define Query Terms" on the monitor creation page:
This will split your search into a news query (i.e. the terms you want Pulse to search for in news articles) and a social query (i.e. this will only influence the search on social media posts, not the news):
Please note: When you separate the news and social terms, for the news terms, Primer uses an analyzer which can lemmatize and stem words to find common roots, so a search on: policy will return results of both “policy” and “policies”. News terms can also be utilized with any of our Boolean operators.
Primer Curated Monitors
You can also select one of the Primer curated monitors, to duplicate and modify those terms to fit your specific needs. From the Pulse landing page, find a Primer curated monitor, and select duplicate:
It will show up on your landing page, and you can edit the terms if you would like:
Pulse can be configured to alert you via email when activity of interest in the news or social media has met a set of conditions. This ensures responsiveness while allowing you to focus on other tasks outside of the Command application.
How to Create an Alert for Your Monitor
When looking at the list of your monitors, on the right click the 3 dots and click Edit:
Find the Alerts tab
You will see “Alert me when” and a drop down menu option next to it with options for News, Social Media, or both:
Customize your frequency time frame and volume alert notice and make sure the “Email me when Alert is triggered” is toggled on if you'd like to receive an email notification
Pro Tip: If you want to see an idea of what the topic volume looks like before you set an alert you can explore that on the feed summary of the monitor:
Please note: Alerts are currently available when creating a new monitor (not on the Primer curated monitors). To create an alert on an existing Primer curated monitor you will need to recreate the monitor, then add the desired alerting criteria.
Monitor Volume Limits
Each monitor has an initial quota of 500 Twitter/X posts per hour and 4,000 posts per hour combined from the other available social media sites. After the respective quotas are reached,, Primer will only ingest the 1% of the total volume stream for those monitor terms the rest of the day. For example, if the total volume stream is 1M, we would ingest an additional 10k posts for that day.
In addition to the daily quota restrictions, we also apply a limit of 150,000 social media posts and news articles per monitor. This means that for each monitor, we will ingest the 150k most recent posts and articles, up to the 30 day max monitor period.
For questions on how to create a monitor, please reach out to our Customer Success team at [email protected]