Did you ever know the power of social media monitoring? This article presents how to optimally use Social Mention, as well as other powerful tools. In the simplest terms, social media monitoring is defined as the process of using a tool to monitor things that are said or talked about online. This is also known as social media listening. The process involves monitoring social media activity to extract information about a particular individual or brand.
Social media content is tracked from various sources including wikis, blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, other social networking sites, news sites, message boards, Youtube and photo/video sharing platforms. This content is used to determine the sentiment and frequency of online conversations related to a topic or brand. Brands then make use of this information to alter their social media policy for an improved online presence. Numerous tools such as Social Mention have become popular over the years because of their ability to monitor and analyze social media activity in real-time for free. [lexicon]
What is Social Mention?
Social Mention is a search engine that seeks and analyzes user-generated content across the whole world by aggregating it into a single stream of information. Through this free tool, you can easily track and record the social presence, i.e. what people around the world are saying about you, your brand, any new product, or on any other topic across the Web and social media landscape.
It used to monitor more than 100 social media websites. These included YouTube, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Google, FriendFeed among many others. However, due to new restrictions to these platforms APIs taken effect in 2017 and 2018, some of these data sources were removed. This is not to say that socialmention is not useful anymore, as it still provides numerous data sources for free.
Social Mention also allows you to either explore or set up daily email alerts, in a similar fashion to Google Alerts, for the supported social data sources. These alerts can provide useful social media analytics pertaining to your company’ social presence. [socialmention] [thebalance]
How to use Social Mention?
Social Mention lets you search the social media platforms for specific keywords. In return to a search query, the tool produces a list of mentions related to the keyword that you provide it with. These results can then be filtered by date and source. If you wish to receive more specific results, the ‘advanced search’ feature will help you with this.
Every search you make will return a score for sentiment, strength, reach, and passion:
- Sentiment: Ratio of negative to positive mentions.
- Strength: The probability of your search term being mentioned.
- Passion: The chances that people will frequently talk about your search item.
- Reach: The depth of influence that your search term has.
Along with these, you will also see the time of the last mention, the average number of days between each mention, the number of retweets/shares of the mentions, as well as the number of unique authors talking about it.
Social Mention will also provide a separate breakdown based on sentiment to show the total number of negative, neutral and positive mentions. Below that is a list of top keywords, top hashtags, sources and top users.
Now that you have an understanding of how social mention works and what information it provides you with, here are a few helpful tips on how you can use the tool to its full potential:
- Choose the right keywords: Identify your brand’s unique selling point, such as a particular product or service that is popular among customers. Use these, along with your brand name, as keywords for Social Mention to achieve best results for social media optimization. [adeptplus]
- Understanding the metrics: The four primary metrics generated by Social Mention are sentiment, strength, passion and reach as mentioned above. These metrics give you a fair idea about how frequently your brand is being mentioned online and what are the customer’s sentiments when they speak about you. Work with an analyst and utilize this information to improve your business marketing and social media strategy depending on the specifics outlined by Social Mention.
- Set up an RSS Feed: Once you are on the Social Mention website, you will be able to see an option for RSS Feed on the right-hand side of the screen. Click on it to set up an RSS Feed for your brand social media mentions. Doing so will allow you to monitor a feed that is updated in real-time, showing the latest information about activity related to your brand. [dummies]
Alternative tools to Social Mention:
Social Mention is a free and powerful tool that comes in quite in handy for monitoring social media activity. However, there is often a need for even more powerful tools that handle analytics and number crunching for you. This is where paid social media tools, such as Mentionlytics come in quite handy. Here is a list of some of the best alternatives to Social Media available today:
Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is an award-winning Media Monitoring tool. Offering its services for some of the most competitive prices, Mentionlytics does more than just social media monitoring. Although it is not a free service, you can get a free 14-day trial which will give you plenty of data for your brand for free, plus you can download your results in excel or PDF.
The tool allows you to seamlessly integrate analytics from your business social media accounts into your marketing decisions. Mentionlytics automatically tracks mentions about your brand on the social media and web, as well as gathers the results for further processing. The collected information is then used to generate statistics about your most vocal customers and lets you reward them with special promotional packages. Furthermore, you can even keep a track of marketing and sales lead directly from the social media channels through the use of Mentionlytics social media tracking tool.
Starting from just $29 per month, one has to say that Mentionlytics prices are competitive, especially when you consider the vast range of features that the tool provides for monitoring and analyzing social media activity.
Klout
2018 update: Klout is no longer – It has been closed down in 2018.
Klout is one of the most controversial tools for social media analysis. Many people find this tool useful because it measures influence based on engagement on Twitter. They believe the tool enables them to keep an eye on what people are thinking about their brand and what things have the greatest influence on them. You can also use your Klout score to modify your posts, according to the interests of the target audience so that your engagement rate can be increased.
Talkwalker Alerts
Talkwalker Alerts is a nice free service provided by Talkwalker social media monitoring tool. It might be quite restricted in the fact that it has no interface to search or view analytics but still, you will be able to have some basic social media and web monitoring delivered to your email for free! You can also upgrade to the full Talkwalker service starting at $9,600 (yikes!).
Mention
Mention lets you visualize your online presence by extracting the information you want from all of the noise online. The platform has been liked by users because it monitors millions of sources in real time and is compatible with a large number of languages. [brandwatch] [socialmediaexaminer]
Conclusion
Today, with billions of people using social media, it can be quite difficult to keep track of what is being said and done on these social platforms. Social media monitoring tools (such as Social Mention) have made life easy for businesses and social analysts. These tools handle the computation and data generation process so that professionals can focus on what is more important i.e. decision making. This article outlines how you can use Social Mention, one of the most popular social media monitoring tools, and its alternatives to drastically improve your brand’s performance on social media.
References
[1]Social Media Monitoring.Financial Times. Retrieved on 1 October 2016, from http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=social-media-monitoring.
[2] Social Mention. Social Mention. Retrieved on 1 October 2016, from http://www.socialmention.com/about/
[3] Wolfe, L. 8 September 2016. What is social mention? The Balance. Retrieved on 1 October 2016, from https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-social-mention-socialmention-com-tools-and-tips-3515570
[4] Wysocki, J. 6 February 2016. Social Mention for Beginners: Find Out Who is Talking About Your Brand. Adept Plus. Retrieved on 2 October 2016, from http://adeptplus.com/blog/social-mention-for-beginners-find-out-who-is-talking-about-your-brand/
[5] Cains, J. T. How to understand social mention metrics. Dummies. Retrieved on 2 October 2016, from http://www.dummies.com/education/internet-basics/how-to-understand-social-mention-metrics/
[6] Mindruta, R. 9 August 2013. Top 15 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. Brandwatch. Retrieved on 3 October 2016, from https://www.brandwatch.com/2013/08/top-10-free-social-media-monitoring-tools/
[7] Weinberg, T. 24 March 2015. 6 Social Media Monitoring Tools to Track Your Brand. Social Media Examiner. Retrieved on 3 October 2016, from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/6-social-media-monitoring-tools/
[8] Zeevi, D. 1 July 2015.12 Best Social Media Management Tools. Dashburst. Retrieved on 3 October 2016 from https://blog.dashburst.com/best-social-media-management-tools/
Gather and analyse all Web & Social mentions to your brand
Mentionlytics works 24/7 and scans for pages and users mentioning your brand and your competitors. Get Share of Voice, Sentiment Analysis, Influencers and many other reports automatically.
