A search shows you what your market is asking today. But the questions don't stand still. A new product launches, a price changes, a rule comes in, a trend takes off, and suddenly people are asking something they weren't last month.
You could run the same search every week and compare the results by eye. Monitoring does it for you.
How monitoring works
When you save a search as monitored, OverHeard re-checks it on its cadence and flags the questions that are new since the last check. You don't have to remember what was on the board before. The new questions are marked for you.
Monitored searches live in one place, so you can see every topic you're watching, what's new in each, and turn a new question into a brief or draft straight away. On paid plans, monitoring comes with weekly briefs for the topics you follow.
Why new questions matter most
A question that has just started appearing is the best kind of opportunity. Few people have answered it yet, the existing answers are thin, and the people asking are actively looking. If you publish a clear answer early, you're the one they find.
The best time to answer a question is shortly after people start asking it.
By the time a question has been around for a year, there's usually a well-established answer somewhere. Monitoring helps you get there first.
What to monitor
- Your main offering. The search that describes your core business. This is where new worries about your service show up.
- Topics next to yours. Adjacent problems your customers have. A skincare brand might watch "sensitive skin" and "eczema-friendly routines" separately.
- Competitors and alternatives. Searches that describe what people compare you with. New questions here often reveal why people are switching.
A weekly routine that takes fifteen minutes
- Open your monitored searches and look only at what's flagged as new.
- For each new question, check its provenance: is it recurring already, and when was it last seen?
- Pick the one or two most promising and turn them into briefs.
- Note any that aren't ready yet, and look again next week to see if they've grown.
Done every week, this keeps your content plan tied to what people are asking now, not what they were asking when you first did your research.
Getting started
Monitoring is one of the features where we ask for an email, because we need somewhere to send your updates. Run a search, check the board looks right, then save it as monitored.