Every mention is read before you see it. Serpfeed files it under one of your labels and gives it a sentiment, so the feed answers “what kind of day is this” at a glance rather than after twenty minutes of clicking into posts.
The labels you start with
Every project begins with seven, chosen because they are the ones that lead to different actions:
| Label | What lands there |
|---|---|
| Testimonial | Praise, a recommendation, or somebody describing a good result. |
| Complaint | Frustration: a poor experience, slow support, pricing anger, talk of leaving. |
| Bug report | A specific technical failure, as opposed to general unhappiness. |
| Product idea | A feature request or a wish for something that does not exist yet. |
| Question | Somebody asking something you could answer. |
| Misinformation | Something stated about you that is not true. |
| Just a mention | Your name came up in passing, and there is nothing to do. |
A mention gets exactly one label, which is what makes the Label column worth scanning. Sentiment is separate and independent: a testimonial is almost always positive, but a product idea can be either, and a complaint can be politely worded and still be a complaint.
The description is the instruction
This is the part worth knowing, and it is not obvious. A label’s description is not a note to yourself. It is what Serpfeed is told to look for. Edit it, and the filing changes from the next mention on.
So if posts about your pricing keep landing under Complaint when you would rather see them separately, you do not report that as a mistake. You add a label called Pricing, describe it as “anyone discussing what we cost, whether or not they are unhappy about it”, and it starts arriving that way.
Good descriptions say what belongs there AND what does not. “A specific technical failure, not general unhappiness” is doing more work than “bugs”, because the useful half of a description is the boundary with the label next to it.
Making them yours
- Add a label for anything your business actually acts on differently: churn risk, partnership requests, competitor comparisons, press.
- Edit any of them, including the seven you started with. Renaming one is safe: mentions already filed under it keep their badge.
- Archive one you do not use. Archiving stops it being used for new mentions and takes it out of the filters, and old mentions that carry it still show it. Nothing is rewritten.
You can have up to twelve active labels. That is a real limit rather than an arbitrary one: every label has to be told apart from every other one, and a long list makes each of them fuzzier. Seven precise labels beat twenty vague ones, every time.
Sentiment
Positive, neutral or negative, judged toward the thing being discussed rather than the tone of the writing. A cheerfully written post about your outage is negative.
The Sentiment column is off by default, because the label usually implies it and the two side by side crowd the row. Turn it on from the column menu above the table if you want both, or use it as a filter without showing it.
Unlabelled mentions
A mention with no label is one Serpfeed could not confidently place, usually because it is a fragment, a different language, or genuinely ambiguous. Filter to Unlabelled to see them.
If a lot of your feed is unlabelled, that is a signal about your labels rather than about the mentions: something you receive regularly has nowhere to go. Adding one label with a clear description usually empties the pile.