What is Social Mention and How to Track [Recommended Tools]

Your brand’s online reputation depends on how relevant you are to your audience on social media. Monitoring social media mentions can help you become relevant to your audience by giving you insights into what’s working and what’s not. Then, you can improve your business based on these insights and sharpen your competitive edge.

When you track social media mentions, you gain more control over the public’s opinion about your brand. You can capitalize on the positive comments and improve on your flaws. In this guide, you’ll find out how to use social mentions to get cool insights into online discussions about your brand. 

What is Social Mention?

Social mentions are posts, comments, reviews, or casual tags of your brand, product, or service on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Tracking mentions on social media is one of the best ways to understand your brand’s sentiment and engagement.

Are people saying positive, negative, or neutral things about your products or services? How often do they engage with your content? Social mentions help answer these questions. You can easily find these conversations in real-time with good social media monitoring tools.

Why Do Social Mentions Matter?

Social media mentions directly impact your brand’s reputation. When people talk about your company on social media, it increases exposure and raises brand awareness. But this effect could be a good or bad experience, depending on the subject of the conversation. For example, if a customer applauds your product or service in their post, it will serve as a powerful endorsement, building trust among potential customers.

But when they openly express dissatisfaction, it reduces your credibility in the market, and potential customers would be wary of patronizing your brand. Fortunately, social media mentions can help you avoid such incidents. Keeping a close watch on the public’s opinion will help you quickly catch negative reviews or complaints and respond to them promptly.

What are the Types of Social Mentions?

There are three main types of social media mentions, which are positive, negative, and neutral mentions.

1. Positive mentions

Positive social mentions are great for your brand. These conversations include compliments, recommendations, and thumbs-ups from satisfied customers or big shots in your industry. Here’s a typical example:

“I just got my new ABC laptop, and I’m loving it so far! It’s ultrafast and lightweight, and the battery lasts for 5 hours. I highly recommend it.”

2. Negative mentions

Complaints, criticisms, and warnings about poor experiences with your company are negative social mentions. If you don’t tackle them properly, they can ruin your brand image and chip reduce customers’ trust. For instance:

“ABC’s customer service is the worst. I’ve been on hold for over a week and still can’t get help with my broken laptop. Will never buy from them again.”

3. Neutral mentions

Neutral social mentions are objective statements about your brand that have neither a positive nor negative sentiment. News articles, blog posts, and social shares of your content usually fall under this category. For example:

“ASUS just released their latest laptop, the Zenbook 14X OLE, with a NanoEdge display and ultrafast touchscreen.”

What are the Tools for Tracking Social Mentions?

1. Mandala AI

Mandala AI is one of the best tools for monitoring social mentions. It lets you discover people’s comments about your brand, products, or competitors across various social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Mandala AI provides real-time mention alerts so you can respond quickly. You’ll get an overview of who is talking about you, the reach and influence of authors, and whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. 

Features 

• Data analytics with real-time data.
• Filter results by social network, author, sentiment, location, and language.
• KW and channel libraries
• Discover new trends

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers customizable search streams that allow brands to monitor various social platforms in one place. The platform also offers a more powerful tool called Hootsuite Insights. It’s a paid version with heavy-duty social listening capabilities. 

This social mention tool allows brands to collect quantitative and qualitative data, such as social share of voice, sentiment analysis, and social ROI. Hootsuite also offers more tools for social media management capabilities. These features include auto-responder, saved replies, automated tagging, and post-scheduling.

Features

• Social media scheduling
• Team collaboration
• Analytics dashboard 

3. Brand 24

Brand24 is another notable mention tool for social media monitoring. It digs deep with natural language processing to determine the vibe behind your online brand mentions. It’s like a sentiment detective telling you if the customer is happy, unsatisfied, or somewhere in between.

Brand24 is particularly useful for managing brand reputation and understanding how consumers perceive your brand online. It offers some nifty extras, too, such as mention analytics, influence score, and sentiment analysis. 

Features

• Sentiment analysis
• Real-time alerts
• Influencer identification

4. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is another powerful web and social media mention tracker. It’s a professional-grade tool that tracks keywords everywhere – blogs, news sites, video platforms, and even social media, which means you can monitor mentions even beyond social media.

Additionally, Mentionlytics offers sentiment analysis and multi-language tracking capabilities, making it suitable for Fortune 500 companies and multinational brands. The mentioned app also offers social media engagement tracking with metrics to help you measure your audience’s level of engagement with your social media content.

Features

• Competitor analysis
• Image and logo detection
• Engagement tracking 

Related Post: What are Social Media Algorithms and How Do They Work?

How to Analyze Social Mentions

You can use multiple tools to analyze social mentions, such as Mandala AI. This tool provides you with insights at your fingertips to shape marketing campaigns, improve products and services, and strengthen your brand reputation. Plus, you will never have to manually search for mentions again with Mandala AI.

Let’s see how Mandala AI helps you keep tabs on social media conversations about your brand or product. We’ll use Mexican food for this illustration, but you can apply these same techniques to any product, service, or brand. 

• Step 1: Log into your Mandala Analytics account and select the Sentiment Analysis function.
• Step 2:  Select the negative sentiment (the red line) to pull up all the negative comments and complaints.
• Step 3: Analyzing the negative sentiment, we can see several complaints about restaurants serving Mexican food that are not considered authentic enough. 
• Step 4: Click on the eye icon to open the original post and see if anyone agrees or if there’s any more discussion about what they’re posting.
• Step 5: Click the ‘Add tag’ button to filter mentions according to your preference.
• Step 6: You can find these tags later by opening the Mentions console and selecting the Advanced Mentions Filter.
• Step 7: Use the advanced filter to access your saved tags and share them with your team whenever necessary.

What are the Best Practices for Social Mention Monitoring?

Social mention tracking may seem ambiguous or stressful, especially if it’s your first time. Follow these best practices to streamline the process and get the most out of it:

1. Set specific goals

Decide on what you want to track and why before setting up searches. Are you interested in monitoring brand mentions, competitor activity, or industry trends? The more targeted your goals, the more effective your tracking will be.

2. Select the right tools

Use a social mention tracker like Mandala AI. Our AI-powered tool scans YouTube and various social media platforms for any mentions of keywords you specify. You can use Mandala to set up searches for your brand name, product name, industry terms, or competitors.

3. Check frequently

Review social mentions at least 2-3 times weekly, or daily, if possible. The faster you spot mentions, the quicker you can respond and engage. Look for trending topics or spikes in mentions that could signal an opportunity or crisis.

4. Use real-time alerts

Set up real-time alerts for critical keywords or mentions. These alerts give you the inside scoop on real-time discussions or tags related to your brand. Hence, you can respond quickly and address relevant queries or complaints from your followers.

5. Analyze and report

Track metrics like volume of mentions, share of voice, sentiment, influencers, trending topics, etc. Share reports with your team and stakeholders to keep them in the loop. Discuss opportunities to improve on critical issues that demand immediate attention.

6. Engage and respond

Reply to mentions, especially those from influencers or who need a response. Thank people for the positive mentions. Address negative comments or misinformation using a personalized tone. Continuous follow-up with your target market builds goodwill and loyalty. Responding to all mentions may be unrealistic, so focus on those that matter most.

7. Review and optimize

Regularly evaluate what’s working and not working in your social mention monitoring. Sometimes, you may have to make changes to improve data quality and make it more actionable. Add or remove search terms, reconfigure how you analyze data or share insights, and revisit your goals to ensure maximum impact.

8. Use advanced filters

Most monitoring tools allow you to apply filters to sort and prioritize mentions based on sentiment, location, language, and more. Using this feature allows you to tune out the noise and focus on the most relevant conversations. For example, it can help evaluate target consumers’ attitudes and calculate a social sentiment score.

9. Identify influencers

Always check out new content from influential people who mention your brand. Engaging in their comments and posts can enhance how the public sees your brand. Look for user accounts with a substantial number of followers who are actively engaging with their content.

Mandala AI is a Reliable Tool for Comprehensive Social Mention Monitoring

By tracking your social media mentions, you can understand your audience better, identify market trends, and address issues before they become a full-blown crisis. Also, remember that social media is a continuous process, meaning that you must show up every day to paint your business in the best light possible.

Pay attention to popular market opinions and engage with your community on various platforms. Customers’ ideas can help you improve your offerings or create upselling opportunities. Don’t be shy to show your human side – people will appreciate your authenticity. 

It’s possible to miss out on some negative sentiments due to a busy schedule. Because of this, we recommend Mandala AI as the best option to keep you in the loop. You can start monitoring social media mentions today with Mandala AI by accessing our 15-day free trial for new subscribers. Get started with Mandala AI now!