A feed you stop opening is worse than no feed. If yours has too much in it, the fix is usually a few fields in Monitoring → Settings and about five minutes. Here is what each one does, and which to reach for.
Start with the keyword, not the filters
Filters tidy what you see. The keyword decides what gets collected, so a keyword that is really a common word is the thing to fix first. “Acme” finds every Acme in the world; “Acme CRM” finds yours. A one-word product name is the usual offender, and swapping it for the two-word version is the single highest-value change on this page.
After that there are two kinds of control below. Sourcesdecides where Serpfeed looks at all, so it changes what gets collected. The rest are filters: they decide what reaches your feed out of what was collected. Both are useful, and it is worth knowing which one you are reaching for.
Excluded words
A mention containing one of these never appears in your feed. This is the one most people need, and the two words that solve most cases are hiring and job: a brand name in a job advert is not a conversation about your product.
Add whatever your own noise looks like. A shared name with a band, a film or a town is fixed by excluding a word that always appears alongside the wrong one.
Blocked authors
Some accounts post about everything. Blocking one hides their posts from your feed without touching anything else, and you can add them here or straight from a mention’s menu, where the entry names the account so you do not have to copy it.
Blocked domains
Aggregators and scraper sites republish other people’s posts, so one thread can arrive several times wearing different clothes. Blocking the domain leaves the original and drops the copies.
Reddit communities
Reddit gets two extra fields, because it is the platform where the room matters most.
- Only these subreddits is the narrowing one. Name the two or three communities your customers actually use, and nothing else from Reddit reaches your feed. Powerful, and easy to overdo: you will not see the conversation that starts somewhere new.
- Never these subreddits is the gentler one. Everything arrives except the rooms you have ruled out, which is usually the better default.
Use one or the other. Filling in both means the allow list is doing all the work and the block list is decoration.
Sources
The Sources card at the top of Settings is where you choose which platforms you want. If half your feed is a platform your customers do not use, that is the switch, and it is a bigger lever than any of the fields above: everything else here hides things after they arrive, while this one stops them being collected, which also stops them using your monthly mentions.
Fix it once, in Settings
The other kind of noise
Sometimes the volume is fine and the problem is that everything looks equally important. That is not a filter problem, it is a labels problem: give the things you act on their own label, then build a saved view or an alert on it. See Labels and sentiment and Alerts.