What does it do and how does it work?
Ok, let's start from the beginning. It isn't new that you can capture tweets that mention some specific words (search). But what if you want to capture tweets that contain some specific words, relevant to you or your brand/company, but within a specific geographic location? Well, this is how the magic happens within Socialmetrix Echo.
How to configure a geofence search to capture geolocated tweets?
First: go to google maps and search for the city you want to target.
Second: Right click on the city, a contextual dialog will appear, click in the option "What's here?". A card will popup below indicating the coordinates (latitude and longitude) for the specific place / city.
Third: Copy the coordinates. In the example above e.g: 40.715784, -73.994129, for New York City. Paste those coordinates in your platform configuration using the word geocode. e.g. tweets in a 10mi radius of New York City mentioning the word museum will be:
museum geocode=40.715784, -73.994129,10mi
This is the search you will have to paste and add in your platform to find tweets with the word museum in it within 10 miles of New York City.
Can I use the geofence with a hashtag?
Yes you can, but you should request this through your client partner assigned. You can not add it yourself in your platform configuration. We are working to accept this type of geofence search through the configuration interface, in the meanwhile, ask your client partner to add the geofence hashtag search for you.
e.g. #playoffs geocode=29.427009, -98.436891,10mi
In this example you will be tracking tweets with the hashtag #playoffs within 10 miles of the AT&T Center Arena in San Antonio, Texas.
But, I don't know how far is a 10 mi coverage?
Don't worry, you can use this tool to draw whatever radius you want and see how much does it cover the distance you want to track on.
Let us know if this was helpful to your daily analytics. :-)