The Ultimate Guide to Tracking and Responding to Social Mentions

Sometimes, you hear people talking about you over the sink in the office kitchen. And sometimes you can never imagine what people say when you’re not present. Well, that’s pretty much the same with brand social mentions.

Often, you receive notifications about people tagging your brand here and there online. But to be honest, there are still many discussions that slip under your radar.

People love gossiping about brands online. And if you don’t know how to track these stealth mentions, you miss opportunities to capitalize on this buzz and even defend your brand’s reputation.

Fear not! You’ve just reached the best guide to help you track down every single social mention of your brand and respond to all of them confidently.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• What are Social Mentions?
• Why Track Social Mentions?
• What Insights Can You Gain by Tracking Social Mentions?
• How to Track Social Mentions?
• How to Respond to Social Mentions?
• Best Practices for Tracking Social Mentions
• Start Tracking Your Social Mentions for Free

What are Social Mentions?

A social mention is anything posted on social media, like a reel, a comment, or a simple post, where your brand, product, or service is mentioned, tagged, or untagged.

Of course, social mentions can also be any posts that contain hashtags or keywords you monitor on social media.

These mentions can take the form of direct tags with @yourbrand or indirect references to you. For example, when a user just types your brand without using the official mention system (@). In that case, this social mention won’t reach your notification box.

Often, brand social media mentions can be considered as customer feedback, shoutouts, and user-generated content as well.

And if you take social media mentions tracking to the next level, a.k.a. social listening, you can uncover the feelings of the audience toward your brand.

Now that you know exactly what is a social mention, keep reading to learn why it’s vital to track them for your brand.

Why Track Social Mentions?

It’s true that customers, influencers, or even your competitors keep talking about your brand on social networks. That’s why monitoring and responding to these mentions is important to understand your audience, offer high-quality customer service, and ultimately maintain a strong online presence.

However, the main reasons why you should track mentions on social media are the following.

For Immediate Customer Feedback

36% of marketing leaders believe that brands can build relationships that last with their customers by humanizing their connections. So, by monitoring your social mentions you can respond promptly to customer inquiries and feedback to create a stronger bond.

That way you show that you’re there for them, to answer all questions and handle all issues. You show that you truly care.

To Prevent A Reputation Crisis

Negative mentions can spread quickly and damage your brand’s reputation. So, when you track social mentions, you can keep an eye on negative posts in real time and address them fast.

That’s how you prevent a backlash from escalating into a full-blown PR crisis. But this is a crucial topic, so we cover it in a separate section below.

To Find Influencers and Brand Collabs

Social media mentions often come from users with thousands of followers and other brands.

By tracking these mentions, you can find influencers for your brand and reach out to them for a partnership. Also, you can see which other brands are eager to forge a brand collaboration with you. In both cases, you’ll reach new audiences.

For Competitor Analysis

Monitoring the social mentions of your competitors can help you understand what customers say and think about them.

This enables you to assess your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and customer perceptions. And you’ll learn from their mistakes and successes.

To Improve Your Products and Services

A social media mention is most likely to be a piece of valuable feedback for your brand. Or even an honest suggestion from your customers.

So, by closely monitoring brand mentions on social media platforms, you can gain insights into customer experiences, preferences, and pain points. This is all the input you need to improve your products and services to meet the needs of your customers perfectly!

To Find UGC

Usually, your brand’s social mentions will be positive or at least neutral. So, you can consider them as pieces of user-generated content.

For example, did you just see a TikTok about how happy a customer is with your brand’s makeup products? That’s a mention and also UGC!

You can include this short video in your next UGC marketing campaign to boost your brand’s trust.

@rachelshea_ Grwm using a full face of Glossier 🎀🩰💗 #grwm #makeup #glossier #glossiermakeup #naturalmakeup #pinkmakeup #whatimreallyinterestedinislove #thatgirl #makeuplook #sephora #sephorasale #pinterestmakeup ♬ original sound – ☠️

To wrap up, there are a hundred reasons to start tracking every single social mention of your brand. It’s a marketing and PR best practice, providing actionable insights to enhance your performance.

As we’re on the subject, let’s analyze further what insights you can harvest from your social mentions.

What Insights Can You Gain by Tracking Social Mentions?

When you start to track mentions of your brand on social media, you can uncover useful data to shape your social media strategy and overall business approach.

We talk about the most important ones below.

1- Accurate Calculation of Brand Awareness

By tracking every social mention of your brand, you can calculate with high precision your brand awareness metrics.

Specifically, you can see who’s talking about you and how many times your brand is mentioned in various channels. This gives you a clear picture of your Share of Voice, a crucial KPI for your brand awareness and publicity compared to your competitors.

2- Customer Sentiments

You can extract meaningful information about your customers’ feelings, by analyzing the sentiments behind your brand mentions.

To explain a bit, a social mention can be positive, negative, or neutral. With this sentiment analysis of your mentions, you can identify in which areas your brand scores great and where you need to improve.

Also, sentiment analysis helps you distinguish which mentions need immediate response to keep customers happy and prevent crises.

3- Social Reach and Engagement

Calculating the reach of your posts and the total social media engagement of your brand is tricky.

However, a social media monitoring tool that tracks your mentions across all social channels gives you these insights in seconds. In fact, Mentionlytics offers this exact information the second you log into the platform.

By measuring how many people are engaging with your social media content or seeing content about your brand, you can assess the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

Not to mention that social reach is another key metric for brand awareness.

4- Audience Demographics

Social mentions can help you develop a deeper understanding of your target audience and fine-tune your content to resonate better with them. You can scan who has mentioned your brand to see their location, culture, gender, and interests.

Isn’t this the perfect content fuel, or what?

5- Identification of Emerging Trends and Opportunities

By analyzing the discussions around your brand or related keywords through social mention tracking, you can stay up to date with what the market wants.

For instance, if you notice a spike in mentions about a specific feature of your product, this could indicate a growing demand in the market. Spotting such trends allows you to tailor your content, product offerings, and even PR campaigns to cater to the evolving needs of your audience.

The bottom line is that social mentions are invaluable business data. They can help you assess your marketing performance, unlock new opportunities for growth, and really get the people you’re talking to.

Now, we’ll give you a glimpse into how to track mentions on social media without spending 8 hours per day searching and scrolling.

How to Track Social Mentions?

First things first, you have to realize that your notifications on social media DON’T give you the whole picture of your brand’s mentions out in the wild.

Probably, there are lots of them that don’t reach your notifications because users haven’t tagged you there. So, are you wondering how to track these mentions efficiently?

We have the answer below.

Use a Social Mention Tool

The answer is to use a social mention tool, like Mentionlytics. It can help you track social media mentions of your brand, hashtags, and other keywords quickly and easily.

Try Mentionlytics for FREE

No manual work, we promise!

The process is quite simple. You can start by adding to the platform your brand name and anything you want to track on social media. These will be your Trackers.

The moment you finish up this initial step, Mentionlytics will start monitoring all social media channels for mentions of them, tagged or untagged. 

Pro Tip: You can add common misspellings of your brand name as keyword trackers to ensure you won’t miss even one social mention. For example, “Ferari” instead of Ferrari.

Then, the platform will bring back all those mentions and fill out your dashboards.

You can navigate to the social mention search box on the top right side of the dashboard and dig deeper into your results. There, you can make a social media search by name in case you want to keep an eye on specific competitors, influencers, and more.

But there’s more. Mentionlytics is tracking media mentions too, as it scans not only social networks but also the entire web. So, you may also have a news mention or two, that you didn’t know of!

And don’t forget to create a mention alert to get notified about what’s being posted about your brand immediately!

Additionally, you can create awesome social mention reports from the dedicated feature. With these reports, you can gather all your mentions and have your data analyzed and visualized to present them to your team, director, or clients!

Pro Tip: Take it a step further and check out the Top Mentioners feature to see which popular accounts are talking about your brand frequently. You should consider these users for your next influencer marketing campaign.

So, this is basically an easy-peasy way to track down every social mention of your brand.

Let’s explain now how you can measure them to get the gist out of this valuable business data.

How Are Social Media Mentions Measured?

In Mentionlytics, you’ll find 4 KPIs to measure your social mentions in terms of volume and quality.

#1: Total Mentions

It shows how many times social media and web users have mentioned any of your trackers (hashtags, brand name, etc.). This number is a clear indicator of your publicity and awareness.

#2: Social Reach

It shows how many users have seen your mentions on all social media platforms and the web. This metric helps you quantify your brand awareness.

#3: Social Engagement

This is the total number of engagements (likes, comments, etc.) of your mentions on social media. It’s a KPI that proves if the content around your brand is appealing to the audience.

#4: Sentiment Analysis

This uncovers the feelings of the audience toward your brand by filtering your mentions. It’s the ultimate metric to spot UGC, prevent backlashes, and understand the people behind the screens.

As a final note, there are various free social mention tools and social searcher options available online. However, if you want to ensure that your data is complete and get actionable results and not just information, you should pick a social listening tool like Mentionlytics.

To test all of these features, create an account on Mentionlytics and enjoy two weeks of the premium version.

Try Mentionlytics for FREE

But don’t go just yet! Keep reading as we share with you some helpful tips for handling social mentions like a pro below.

How to Respond to Social Mentions?

You should consider responding to each social mention as the necessary ingredient to build your brand community. Only by listening and interacting with your target audience, can you forge stronger relationships and prove your commitment to customer satisfaction.

But don’t get scared. Follow these tips below.

Be Prompt

Respond to social mentions as quickly as you can. Especially to time-sensitive queries or negative comments. Quick reflexes demonstrate your attentiveness to your audience.

Then, keep an eye on the conversation after your initial response. Answer any follow-up questions or comments from the user.

Be Professional

Regardless of the tone of the mention, you should maintain a respectful manner in your responses. Professionalism is of the essence when answering on social media.

Avoid getting defensive or engaging in arguments with negative mentioners. Maintain your brand voice and always thank the users for their feedback, good or bad.

You can also use humor in positive mentions to show the human face of your brand.

Be Helpful

If the social mention is negative or involves a customer complaint, respond empathetically. Acknowledge their concerns, apologize if necessary, and offer a solution.

Then, take the conversation privately to resolve the issue. Redirect the user to your customer support team and address the issue as far as you can.

Bonus: Learn more about how to handle negative comments

Be Positive

You should keep your brand’s social media presence positive at all times. Celebrate your positive mentions. Share UGC and credit the user. Encourage experience sharing.

That means also taking responsibility for any issue and trying to resolve it in a friendly mood.

Lastly, if multiple team members handle your brand’s social media accounts, establish clear guidelines for responding to various types of mentions to ensure a unified approach.

Best Practices for Tracking Social Mentions

Now, this is our favorite part, where we share wisdom on how tracking mentions can help your brand excel!

Without further ado, here are our top 3 best practices you should follow to make the most of this process.

Leverage Social Mentions to Identify Leads and Sales Opportunities

You can monitor the social mentions of pain points or niche-related keywords to keep track of users in need of your product or service. And you can scan your brand mentions for any direct sales opportunities, as in the example below.

Then, you can jump into the conversation and make your offering!

Use Social Mentions to Improve Your Brand Reputation

As we’ve already said in this article, social mentions can be positive or negative. The point is, when you get negative mentions, you should turn them into opportunities to show your brand’s human face.

Be responsive and show empathy. Or be a bit humorous, like this example.

That will immediately turn the situation in your favor, repairing your brand reputation.

Share Your Best Mentions as UGC

Don’t miss the chance to reshare the best pieces of user-generated content and thank their creator in the caption.

That way, you enhance your brand image and cultivate a relationship with your community.

Start Tracking Your Social Mentions for Free

That’s it! Now you know all the basics for social mentions and how important they are for your marketing, PR, social media, and even overall business performance.

To get a taste of how you can keep track of them automatically, try Mentionlytics now — 14 days free, no credit card required!