How to Track Social Mentions? [2024 Guide]

Whether you’re a small business, or a brand investing thousands of dollars into its social media presence, you’re most likely talked about by other people online. Every time you appear in other people’s tweets, Facebook updates, or Instagram comments, it counts as a social mention.

The more people talk about your brand online, the bigger brand awareness you have. And it translates directly to increased sales and your overall position on the market.

Here is everything you wanted to know about it:

• What is a mention?
• What is a social mention?
• How to track mentions on social media?
  • Manual tracking
  • Using social mention tools
• How to respond to social media mentions?
• Conclusion

What is a mention?

In digital marketing, a mention refers to any time a brand, product, service, or company is talked about online. This could happen on various digital platforms, including social media, blogs, news articles, forums, podcasts, newsletters, reviews and more.

Mentions play a crucial role in digital marketing strategies. They can significantly influence a brand’s online presence, reputation, and relationship with its audience.

Types of mentions in digital marketing:

1. Social media mentions: Users tag or mention a brand in their posts or comments.
2. Blog and article mentions: Brands are discussed or cited within blog posts or articles.
3. Forum mentions: Brands are mentioned in discussions on forums and community boards.
4. Review and rating sites: Mentions occur in customer reviews and ratings.
5. Influencer mentions: Influencers mention or endorse a brand in their content.
6. News mentions: Brands are mentioned in news articles or press releases.

Here you can see an example of online mention:

What is a social mention?

Social mention is mentioning or tagging someone’s username or profile in a post, comment, or message on social media platforms. This is accomplished by using the “@” symbol followed by the user’s username. What’s important is that social media users might mention brands or products without tagging them. In that case, to detect such mentions, you need to use a social media monitoring tool.

Such tools conduct sentiment analysis to help you quickly determine whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. Furthermore, they measure key metrics and deliver valuable customer insights.

Social mentions serve various purposes and are a crucial aspect of interaction and engagement on social media.

Here are the examples of social mentions:

How to track mentions on social media?

There are 2 main ways to track social media mentions:

1. Manual tracking
2. Using social mention tools

01 Manual tracking

Well, you can track social media mentions manually by checking notifications on your social media apps.

Here’s how you could go about it:

• Use the search function on each social media platform to look for mentions of your brand, products, or specific keywords. Remember to check for common misspellings or variations of your brand name.
• Manually search for relevant hashtags that are associated with your brand or industry.
• Ensure that your notification settings are configured to alert you of mentions.
• Regularly check the notifications tab on each social media platform.
• Use similar tactics to keep an eye on mentions of your competitors.

However, this process has significant disadvantages:

• Time-consuming: Manual tracking can be very time-consuming, especially as your brand grows.
• Not comprehensive: You might miss mentions, especially if users don’t tag your official profile or if they occur on platforms you are not actively monitoring.
• Lack of social media analytics: Unlike social listening tools, manual tracking doesn’t provide analytics or sentiment analysis.

02 Using social mention tools

While manual tracking is possible, it’s more feasible for small brands. For larger businesses or those serious about reputation management and engagement, investing in a tool is usually more effective.

These tools automate the tracking process, provide comprehensive social media analysis, and ensure you don’t miss out on important conversations.

Here’s a guide on how to set this up:

• Select a social media monitoring tool that suits your business size, industry, and specific needs. Ensure the tool covers all the social media platforms relevant to your brand. For example, Brand24 monitors Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Linkedin, Medium, Quora, Twitch, and Telegram. Try it during the free trial!
• List all relevant keywords, hashtags, brands, and product names you want to track. Then, set up a monitoring project.
• Discover the Mention Tab – the place where all mentions appear. You can filter them to find the most relevant.

• Pay attention to the sentiment of the mentions, whether they are positive, negative, or neutral.
• Configure the tool to send you notifications or reports for mentions.

Remember that effective social and brand mention tracking requires a strategic approach, the right tools, and proactive engagement.

How to respond to social media mentions?

Whether you’re a small, mid-sized business or a large company that gets tens of thousands of online mentions per day, what matters most is:

What can you do with a social mention?

How do you respond to the people who are behind each mention: your customers, your clients, your users, and your fans?

There are 3 types of social mentions:

• Positive – gives you an opportunity to show appreciation to the person behind it.
• Negative – gives you an opportunity to potentially solve a problem. Or, it lets you display some sensitive smarts and show sympathy for customers who didn’t have good experiences.
• Neutral – is an opportunity for you to collect feedback about your service or product that wouldn’t otherwise have been shared.

Collect these social mentions for:

• Information on how to improve user experience
• Ideas about the changes to be made for the next version of your product
• Research on your target audience
• A deeper look into the factors that influence purchase decisions

Whether it’s a positive, a negative, or a neutral mention, each of them is an opportunity for you to engage with your audience.

What to do with a positive mention?

If only every online mention could be ego-boosting flattery! Unfortunately, that’s not the case. But that only makes us appreciate positive mentions even more.

DJ and record producer Alan Walker spends his entire day making music, but he still finds time to let his listeners know how much their support and opinions matter to him with posts like this on his social media channels:

“Reading all your comments. Thanks for all the kind words, I’m glad you like it!”

If you’re still at the point where you think a positive mention isn’t worth any response, just wait until you receive your first negative one.

Then, you may even be tempted to respond to each positive social mention individually. If your brand doesn’t generate too many social mentions yet and you can handle this, great!

Nothing beats personalization and individual attention.

If, however, you receive more than 400 comments & 16k likes from a single post, just take a cue from DJ Alan Walker and simply acknowledge that your listener, user, customer, or client has taken personal time to praise you in a mention, and thank them for it!

What to do with a negative mention?

The example below is our favorite kind of negative social mention. A specific problem has been addressed, which gives us an opportunity to offer a solution.

The T-Mobile customer above is experiencing trouble with coverage and is unable to work because of this problem. They clearly anticipate a quick response from T-Mobile.

If you receive a negative mention like this, which poses a problem that you can solve, fantastic!

Any viable problem has a viable solution. Just remember to respond with patience and kindness in your answer.

It’s understandable if you need time to find an answer or to contact a colleague in a different department. But the person who posted the negative mention will still appreciate a speedy response, even if it is just an initial message to let them know that you’ve seen this negative comment.

Now, what if the social mention is more of a scathing insult, and there isn’t a particular problem for you to solve? What should you do then?

A scathingly negative mention is ruled by emotions.

Whether the problem occurred with your company, a partner, retailer, supplier, or shipping services provider is irrelevant. In the eyes of the customer, you’re guilty by association.

The best way to handle a situation like this is to be direct and apologize.

Acknowledge any mistakes or oversights that may have occurred.

Be sympathetic and truly listen to your customers.

Document the exchange with these negative mentions so that you can learn from it, use it to train future employees, and improve the way that you handle situations like these in the future.

Here’s a guided infographic with more details on each step of the process for handling negative social mentions.

Don’t get upset if the customer doesn’t immediately change their tune afterward.

Your goal isn’t to change their mind. When you’re handling any negative social mention, remember that:

• If there is a specific problem mentioned, try to solve it.
• If there isn’t a particular problem for you to solve, at least acknowledge that your customers did not have a positive experience, and apologize for their inconvenience.
• If applicable, offer compensation or a small token as a gesture of your appreciation that personal time has been wasted.

What to do with a neutral mention?

A neutral social mention is an opportunity for you to collect feedback about your product. Take the example below:

While this mention neither raves nor complains about the Lays’ vs. Doritos versions of wasabi chips, it provides relevant marketing information to both Lays and Doritos (both are actually part of the Frito-Lay family, but that’s another topic).

This neutral social mention shows Lays which other chips their consumers compare them to (Doritos), and the flavors that their customers enjoy (wasabi).

Collecting other social mentions like this (and unlike this) will give you access to all kinds of information that will be helpful to your market research.

Neutral social mentions can help you fill in the gaps and answer questions like:

• Who is my target audience?
• Who is my main competitor?
• What do my customers like about my product?
• What do my customers dislike about my product?
• How can I improve my product?
• Why do they choose my product?
• Why do they choose my competitor’s product?

Conclusion

Do you know those social media accounts that make posts, and that’s it? They don’t engage users, respond to comments, and undoubtedly do not track mentions.

It is not the best way to attract new followers and run a successful profile.

Key takeaways:

• Tracking mentions should be a part of each social media strategy.
• Each social media mention is user-generated content.
• Tracking the sentiment of social mentions will help you manage and protect your brand reputation.
• Pay special attention to mentions from influencers or brand advocates.
• Use the insights gained from the tracking tool to optimize your social presence.
• Address negative social mentions promptly, offering solutions.
• Track mentions of your competitors to gain insights into their social media presence and reputation.

With a social mention tool in hand, you’ll be ready to face even the most challenging situation. The good news is that you can try such a tool for free. Register for a 14-day free trial!