How to track or be notified of posts about your city or country

Google Maps tips & tricks
1

Hi,

Recently I have shared in my chat groups about some little tricks I use in order to keep up to date on things in Local Guides Connect. As you know, Connect is a big forum style board, but there is little in way to follow up well with all new posts about your city. In my case I would like to know if someone has created a new post about Singapore, my home city and country. As passionate community builders, we love to engage with our members, we try very hard to find ways to build our community by welcoming new members, keeping them in the loop, keeping in touch with them etc. And we mourn the loss of our Google+ groups, it has never been the same since.

Tip number 1: Use a bookmarked Local Guides Connect link.

Connect has a nifty way of searching for posts, with some filters available. It’s still a little manual as you would have to search everytime you log in. So I saved this bookmark: https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?q=singapore&sort_by=-topicPostDate&collapse_discussion=true

Yes it’s a huge long link, but once I open this link, immediately it will show me all posts that mention my keyword “Singapore”, in order from newest to oldest. With just one click I can see any posts that are new and relevant to me. This makes sure I don’t miss out on new posts for my city.

For you, just replace the keyword with your own city or country, or any other thing you are interested in! You can filter for language etc, just save the full link once you are happy with the filter.

Note that the default filter shows you by “Best Match”, for my case I have switched to sort by Date.

Screenshot of connect filter
Screenshot of connect filter1081Ă—839 59.6 KB

Tip number 2: Use Google Alerts.

Not everyone likes to log into Connect daily, or use it on mobile.

There is a very old feature called Google Alerts, go to https://www.google.com/alerts

This allows you to track any news or keyword on the internet.

For me, I created this search parameter called “singapore site:localguidesconnect.com”

I now receive a daily email digest with a list of any new posts on the website called LocalGuidesConnect.com that mention Singapore!

You can customize the settings to something that you prefer.

Screenshot of Google Alerts settings
Screenshot of Google Alerts settings743Ă—827 65.4 KB

If you find this useful, please give it a like and feel free to share it with your friends.

31 Likes
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That is an interesting way to do it @JulienH I wonder how much the alert service loads Connect or does it use the normal Google spider?

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Thank you very much @JulienH , this is very efficient way to keep updated on specific topic … and for sure will be valuable to use … Thanks …

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This is great!

Wish it was built into Connect, but at least we have a work around.

thanks for sharing @JulienH you are a good man.

Ps I already do this for tracking my own name. very helpful for when someone online starts talking about you!

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Thank you for sharing this @JulienH

This is great tips!

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Yet again, without fail! Always so full of ideas to make Connect experience better, @JulienH ! :tada::tada:

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thanks for sharing - bookmarked immediately

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@PaulPavlinovich thank you. I gather it’s more of the usual web crawler / spider. I don’t think Connect itself has any API or endpoint available.

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@TimBull You track your own name!? Just kidding, I realized I have it set into my alerts too. I don’t recall why I did that a long time ago. LOL.

It’s always a little scary to google yourself, you never know what you’ll find.

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@Minggg laziness is the necessity of innovation!

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Thanks @JulienH again for this nice tricks :clap:

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12

One of those moments when you open up Google and don’t know what you want to search for.

Exactly the same happened, the tools were there but we had no clue how to use them effectively.

Top most @JulienH , really paved the way and it does the magic

cheers

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Hello @JulienH ,

Thank you very much for sharing additional details about the alert section of google. I just activated few alerts for myself.

Kudos.

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@deepakjhic LOL I only made one alert for myself. Go for it!

Google team will be surprised by how quickly we are now getting notified of new posts!

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@JulienH yea never google your self! lol

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Thank you! I find it very challenging to not be able to filter by physical location. I love your solution but it is dependent on folks putting in the word “Singapore”. I travel the United States and I’d love to search for posts for a particular region (e.g. Washington, California) that I’m in or going to.