Writing good prompts
How to describe the posts you want so AI matches the right ones and skips the rest.
Your prompt is what AI compares every post against. A good prompt is the difference between ten useful alerts a week and a hundred noisy ones.
The short version
- Describe the post, not the topic. "People asking which CRM to use" beats "CRM".
- Say who is posting and what they want. Intent is what separates a lead from a mention.
- Keep it short and specific. One or two sentences; shorter, specific prompts match more accurately than long ones. The limit is 300 characters.
- One intent per rule. Leads and complaints are different jobs; give each its own rule.
Prompt patterns
| Goal | Prompt |
|---|---|
| Leads | Small business owners asking which bookkeeping or accounting software to use, or wanting to switch. |
| Competitor tracking | Posts complaining about Acme's pricing, support or reliability, or asking for an alternative to Acme. |
| Brand monitoring | Posts that mention our brand with a question, a complaint or praise. |
| Customer feedback | Users of our app describing a missing feature, a workaround they built, or a bug. |
| Market research | Parents describing problems managing their kids' screen time, or asking what works. |
| Recruiting | Experienced React developers saying they're open to new remote roles. |
Before and after
CRM softwareMatches job ads, migration stories, memes and vendor promotions: anything about CRMs.
Pair the prompt with keywords
Keywords run first and decide which posts AI reads; the prompt decides which of those match.
- Start with 3-6 keywords a matching post would almost certainly contain, such as the product category, your competitors' names, and phrases like
recommendoralternative to. - Write the prompt for intent.
- Click Suggest with AI on the keyword field to fill gaps from your prompt.
If you get too few matches, widen the keywords first. If you get too many weak matches, tighten the prompt.
Tune with feedback
In the feed, mark matches as Good match or Not a good match and pick a reason (Not what I'm looking for, Spam or self-promotion, Duplicate, Wrong language, Too old). BuzzGlean uses this feedback to learn what each rule should match.
Checklist
- Names who is posting (owners, parents, developers…)
- Names what they want (a recommendation, an alternative, help)
- Mentions what to exclude if it's a common false alarm ("not job posts")
- Fits in one or two sentences