Skip to content
herd
Sign in

Google Alerts for social media: what it misses

By · · 2 min read

Google Alerts is free and good at news and web pages, so it's a fair place to start. It has no source for social media, though, so a post on Threads, Reddit or Instagram reaches you only if Google Search lists it first. For social posts, you need a listening tool that searches those apps.

What does Google Alerts do?

You give it a word or a name, and it emails you when Google Search finds new results for it. That's the whole idea, and it's a good one.

You choose how often the emails come: as it happens, at most once a day or at most once a week. You can also pick a language, a region and the kinds of sites it checks.

Does Google Alerts find social media posts?

Sometimes, but you can't count on it. Its sources are News, Blogs, Web, Video, Books, Discussions and Finance. There's no option for social media.

For a post on Threads, Reddit or Instagram to reach you, Google Search has to list it, and then Alerts has to decide it's worth an email. That's two filters between you and the post, and you can't see either of them.

What else does a Google Alert leave out?

How the person feels. An alert gives you a title, a line of text and a link. You open each one to find out whether it's praise or a complaint, and the complaint might be the one at the bottom.

It won't translate anything either. If a customer writes about you in a language you don't read, the alert hands you words you can't use.

And it matches your words the way Google Search does. A short or common name brings back pages about everyone else with that name, so a café called Bloom gets a lot of florists.

How is Herd different from Google Alerts?

Herd searches Threads, Reddit and Instagram for your keywords and puts every post it finds in one feed. Instagram has no public search of post text, so there Herd looks for your keyword as a hashtag.

Each post also comes with the thing an alert leaves out: a positive, neutral or negative label. Press Translate on a post in another language, and Herd translates it into the language you picked.

The email is the part closest to Google Alerts. Herd sends a daily digest at 8:00 your time, and only on days with new posts. The subject line reads like “Herd: 12 new posts, 3 negative”, so you see the count before you open it.

You can turn the digest off in Settings → Alerts, or with the Turn off link in each email.

Is Google Alerts enough for a small business?

For news and blogs, yes, and it costs nothing. For social media, I wouldn't rely on it, because you never find out what it didn't send.

To see the difference, run Herd's Free Plan next to your Google Alert. It has 1 keyword and 100 mentions, one time, with no card. Use the same name in both for a week, then compare the two inboxes. Paid plans start at $29 a month.