One of my favorite applications for social media monitoring is IFTTT. The tool has “triggers,” fired when something happens, and “actions,” that are executed if triggers happen, by the rules that we can define.
IFTTT offers RSS triggers:
As an action for an RSS IFTTT trigger, we can, for example, send ourselves an email, or save the item in Evernote, or tweet. Thus, we will be alerted and can keep track of the new important content for ourselves – or share the content with peers or on social media.
Here are several ways to create RSS feeds out of search results.
1. Google Alerts have an option to deliver results to an RSS feed:
2. Google News Search Alerts were deprecated in December 2017. However, in Google alerts we can set the “Sources” to “News” – and get an RSS feed of news.
3. Did you know that Bing supports an RSS feed of search results? To get an RSS feed, just add &format=rss to the Bing search URL. Example:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=layoffs&format=rss – this RSS feed will be getting new items when Bing finds new search results containing the word “layoffs”.
By using IFTTT, we can be alerted when new search results appear in the RSS feeds, described above, and collect or share the new items. For example, we can collect news about layoffs that Bing finds. Or, we could collect search results that mention us or our company, tracking our brand. The uses are multiple.