Monitor your brand on the cheap with SocialMention

You know people are chatting about you, your organization, or your brand on social media channels (or you hope they are).  The problem is that most organizations cannot afford to spend money on expensive listening platforms and are often left scratching their heads about how best to approach this need without spending money. SocialMention provides a good tool for people looking to listen on the cheap.

How do  you start?

• Navigate to the SocialMention.com home page.
• Enter the search terms and the channels you want to search across.  I recommend searching across All channels.

For example, I searched for the term “SocialMention” and saw a google search like display page with the image on the right of this post displayed on the left side of the SocialMention page.

Beyond the conversations,what does SocialMention tell you?

SocialMention provides you with some solid metrics. Here are the ones I recommend you pay attention to:

• Strength.  This percentage tells you how active your search term is across the social media channels you searched. It takes the number of actual mentions in the last 24 hours and divides this into the total potential mentions to give you a number.
• Passion.  This is the likelihood that someone will repeatedly discuss your search term.  If every mention of your search term is from a unique user (not repeating) than the passion score will be low.  You want to increase your number of advocates, those that are repeatedly discussing that term.  A higher passion number is a good thing.
• Reach is a measure of unique authors vs. the number of mentions.  It is an indicator of the audience for your search term. 
• Average time between mention.  How popular is this topic?
• Top users. These are the people who are spreading the topic you searched on. How can you best engage with these users to make them advocates?
• Sources.  Where is your traffic coming from?

SocialMention does give you an indicator of the sentiment of your mentions but take this with a grain of salt.  Sentiment analysis is always imperfect so, while you should review it, do not spend lots of time digging into sentiment information.  Instead, focus on using the audience information to grow an engaged community.

John