Keeping up on what’s being said about a company or brand can be difficult with so many different channels. It’s even more challenging when people expect real-time responses via social media to problems and issues. A lack of response when there’s a problem can be more harmful than the problem. Social Mention makes it easy to monitor, not only what’s being said, but also who is saying and what the general sentiment is towards the company or brand.
Social Media Search with Options
To get started, you can just type in your company or brand. You can customize based on the type of media:
Or select specific social networks and channels to search:
Results at a Glance
Social Mention‘s results page gives you all the information you need at a glance. Down the center are results with the most recent first. Each results has the social network or type of content, time of the post, and who posted it. Results can be displayed by date or by source (which takes some time — seems to do another search) and filtered by time period.
Useful Social Media Statistics Summary
On the search results page are some helpful statistics as well, such as sentiment, reach, minutes on average between mentions, number of unique authors, and number of retweets.
Detailed Social Media Statistics
Sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and sources are also displayed along the left side. Each result can be clicked to see more information.
Subscribe for Alerts
For any search, you can subscribe to the results via RSS or email. For email, you can set up the email to only send you the latest relevant results (to reduce space) and you can control what sources and results are important.
Access to Data
Each search can be exported as a CSV/Excel file, as can the Sentiment, Top Keywords, Top Users and Top Hashtag reports. The Top Keywords, Top Users and Top Hashtag reports give you to more data that in visible on the Social Mention website.
Real-Time Social Mentions Widget
For those who want to display real-time results for a particular keyword or phrase on their blog or website, Social Mention also offers a free widget:
While this may seem like a great way to display some useful information on your blog and website, just be aware that it’s pretty unfiltered, so negative results can show up as well. I can see this being useful to display results around a topic instead of a brand.
Conclusion
Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool. The price is right and the data is useful. Especially nice are all the customizations available for searches and the ability to get the data out of their system via either email or rss or by exporting to csv/excel files. What isn’t as clear is how they calculate strength, passion and reach. It would be nice if there was more information there.
The Sentiment calculation includes neutral as positive, plus since it is based mostly on what keywords are used, it isn’t great at understanding true intent (such as if a “bad” keyword is used in a positive way, or vice versa. For example, a sarcastic comment would be mis-labeled). Sentiment is one of the most difficult measures, so it’s nice to have the information, even if you have to take it with a block of salt.
Overall, Social Mention‘s results and information are extremely helpful, especially for trending over time. The ability to get at the data is awesome for those of us who like to do a bit more digging. I highly recommend you add Social Mention into your toolkit.
Have you used Social Mention? What do you think?