Yes, almost every company has automated alerts for mentions about them on any platform. It can be a great thing and it can be abused. A great way for a company to handle social media is to clarify confusion and to answer questions but not raid every thread with defensive or astro turf content.
Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't found it or its newly added. When the PR team can drop in and give a quick update its quite useful.
How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate)
I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are drop in the ocean.
> How do notifications for services like HN get triggered?
Easy, the API allows you to see all the latest X comments/submissions. Setup something to just text-match your name and hit whatever notification endpoint when matching. I think there are services for this that includes HN already too.
> Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch?
YouTube often offers captions for videos, otherwise it's not too hard to generate yourself. Apply same strategy as for HN but for YouTube/TikTok/Twitch. If it has sound, you can usually automatically transcribe it.
This also goes for TV shows like news and whatever. There are services that are transcribing every single news show and scrapes the transcriptions for mentions of brands/companies and whatever. You can use those services to see when your brand gets mentioned, and some services even send you a five-minute snippet of when you were mentioned. I'm sure the same exists for basically every single multimedia medium out there.
Neither an API nor a scrapeable feed is required for you to get a scrapeable feed from it in the end :)
This works great in theory and as one off research projects (source: I've done this). The tricky thing is, can you namedrop any such services that actually work and offer a SaaS model?
I've heard dozens of pitches for such products, but they all end up being either
1) unable to grow due to legal reasons (transcripts are derivative works and thus even creating them, let alone publishing them, is restricted under copyright)
2) pivot to become Yet Another Social Listening Tool with a high-touch sales-heavy SaaS business model. They end up negotiating a deal for direct access to the firehouse feeds with the social media companies themselves, with all the strings attached (completely public content only, sometimes restricted to accounts of certain size, etc).
There are services constantly scraping all public social medias and you pay them some small fee and they let you subscribe to keywords. Of course they might miss some video content but it isn't terribly significant.
You're right, the text does mention Zapier, but what triggers Zapier? Zapier is glue that ties various services together. The web scraper and keyword detection is either a different service or in-house.
Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't found it or its newly added. When the PR team can drop in and give a quick update its quite useful.