Do you treat social media as a megaphone? Saying a lot but not listening to what’s being said about, or to, you?
If you answered yes, it’s time to make a change.
“Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the Internet,” – Search CRM
But how should you go about listening to what’s being said about your brand on social media? I’d heard about Mention, but had never used it, so I decided to sign-up for a trial account and see whether this social media tool checks all the “social media listening” boxes.
What is Mention? – Real-Time Monitoring App
Mention is a paid social media listening tool. It offers more than just online monitoring as you can also use it to respond to social media comments and tweets in real-time. You can listen to sources in over 42 languages, and monitor mentions on social networks, blogs, web sites and news sites.
Mention allows you to react within seconds to alerts, as well as retweet, like, share, and Buffer mentions from within the dashboard.
You can also use Mention to analyze statistics regarding you social media mention, as well as export this data. I have only had the trial account for 4 days, but Mention has already put together some statistics for me that I found incredibly useful (more on that later).
Want to make social media listening to a team effort? You can quickly add team members, share alerts, and assign tasks to team members as well as keep track of everyone’s activity.
Mention has apps for both iOS and Android, and you can also access it on Chrome, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. You can set up push notifications, so you’re alerted of mentions within seconds, or set up weekly or daily digests.
Get a lot of mentions? Mention has sentiment analysis tools and a priority inbox so you can work smarter, not harder.
How to start using Mention?
Most online tools that offer a lot of functionalities tend to be complicated to use – I’m looking at you Google Analytics. However, I fell in love with Mention (in just four days, and around 2 hours of use) because of how simple it is to use.
1. Sign-up
Getting started with Mention is as simple as signing up for a trial account.
You get 14 days to try out the tool before you need to choose from one of four available monthly plan options.
After signing up, you can get started with creating your first alert.
The advanced settings allow you to refine the keywords and phrases you want to SetUp an alert for.
Pick the sources and languages you want to monitor for mentions.
Add the Twitter account, Facebook account and website you want to monitor.
Invite team members to monitor the alert with you.
Once your first alert is setup, you can start monitoring mentions and analyzing statistics.
2. Getting started with Mention dashboard
Inbox
Once Mention has had a few days to track mentions, you will start to see your Mention “Inbox” fill up.
The “Inbox” has a few sections, namely, unread, priority, favorites, archive, irrelevant and trash.
You can quickly search through mentions using the source filter, or search through your inbox using the search option.
Mention flags priority mentions that it thinks are most relevant, such as direct replies to your own tweets. You can also archive, delete, mark irrelevant, favorite or block mentions from within your inbox.
Click on one of the mentions and you get a more comprehensive view. You can reply, retweet, favorite, or quote the tweet directly. You also get an “Influencer” score plus the option to block or follow from inside your Dashboard inbox.
Social Media account management
Social accounts lays out all the social media accounts you have connected with your Mention account. I connected my Twitter, Facebook page, and Buffer account to start with.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, you can compose tweets and other social media updates directly inside Mention. This allows you to reduce the hassle of having to go between one website and the next, since all of your social media presence can easily be managed within one app.
Tasks feature to lower load from your shoulder
The tasks section is most useful for teams, as you can assign tasks – for example, replying to a certain mention, and then keep track of the tasks allocated to you.
Activity
Similarly, the Activity tab shows you the recent activity by your team on your Mention account.
Statistics
In the top-left corner of your Mention page is a small statistics tab. However, your statistics section isn’t going to have much to show for the first few days since Mention only starts tracking and analyzing from when you sign up.
4 days into using Mention, I had a few things in my inbox, which allowed me to get an idea of what the statistics feature offers.
Number of Mentions
For each alert, you can review the number of mentions using filters like date, source, type and sentiment to get a graph and some quick statistics.
The Sentiment Analysis is a quick overview of whether the mentions you are receiving are positive, negative or neutral.
Sources
Since Mention tracks a lot of sources, it’s important to be able to break down your mentions based on where they are coming from.
As you can see, most of the mentions I received were on Twitter – which matches what I was expecting.
Location & Activity
The next panel shows you the location each mention came from.
As my recent Twitter activity has revolved around promoting my ShoutMeLoud posts, most of my mentions are coming from the South Asian continent.
Mention also divides this activity down by day of the week.
Find Influential Websites & Twitters
Interested in learning who is talking about you at a glance? You can view the website and Twitter users mentioning you from the Statistics tab, as well as look at their Influencer scores.
If you’re monitoring mentions in more than one language, you will also be able to see a breakdown by language.
Export your Feed
While there are a lot of ways you can customize your account, this is by far the coolest thing I noticed.
You can export all your mentions as an RSS feed. So if you’re monitoring a lot of alerts, and don’t want to receive emails or push notifications, you can extract an RSS feed for your alert and use your RSS reader to keep track as well.
Mention Monthly Plans & Pricing
After your 14 day free-trial ends, you’re going to have to switch to a paid account. Unfortunately, Mention doesn’t have any free plan for users.
They offer four options: Starter, Growth, Company and Enterprise, ranging from 29 euros for Starter to 799 dollars for Enterprise. The more expensive plans obviously offer more; more team members, more alerts and more features.
*Note: I wonder why they have three plans mentioned in euros and one in dollars*
Is Mention App worth your time & money?
Mention is awesome. It is easy to setup and use, simple to keep track of different alerts and great for teams. Especially for agencies & reputation management companies, Mention will help them to stay ahead from their competitor.
Take 14 days free trial of Mention app
While a huge part of the world is still using Free Google alerts which is indeed a great app to monitor what people are talking about anything on the web, but Mention has taken online monitoring to next level.
Would you sign up for Mention? Which features excites you the most and why? Leave me a note in the comments!
Is it possible to use this and monitor when mentions from OUTSIDE your own country is made? I setup a news blog, and news about my president are obviously first accessed by the big newspapers and TV stations and big websites.
But if I can be the first to get news about the president’s mentions from outside the country, it sets me apart.
Are you aware if mention app can be set to do this?
This allows us to reduce the hassle of having to go between one website and the next, since all of your social media presence can easily be managed within one app. liked it
thanks
I don’t know whether this application worth or not but rather the best thing about the application is, it gives free 14 days free trial. In any case, appears to be great apparatus
Great “How To Automate Social Media Listening With Mention?” Well wiz online networking administration is getting more progressed. You can now even screen notice about your image or name. This can be extremely helpful on the off chance that you have more than one social humming stage.
very nice app , best thing about the app it gives a trial version also;…thnx for sharing the review…
Hi Nida,
Love the way you explain the things so better. And as you mention it is giving 14 days free trial surely going to give it a try.
Thanks for sharing with us!
Tejas
How was your experience with Mention? Did you try it out?
Still i used many tools for social media schedule promotion .but sits different in a function and feature .I am also Internet marketing Executive .so It’s really helpful for me.
Glad to hear you liked it 🙂
Hi Nida,
Fab screen shares!
Social is a 2 way street. The megaphone reference is spot on, and it’s one reason why many bloggers fail to use social intelligently. Asking questions and sharing answers through Mention just makes sense because your investment will be put to good use, and it will reap a huge return. I ask more questions on twitter and Facebook every day; opening a 2 way street has helped me build a community over at my blog, and on my social profiles.
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Glad you liked the post Ryan 🙂 Have a great day!
I don’t know whether this app worth or not but the best thing about the app is, it gives free 14 days free trial. But seems good tool.
Yep, try it out and see if it fits your needs 🙂
Gee wiz social media management is getting more and more advanced. You can now even monitor mentions about your brand or name. This can be very handy if you have more than one social buzzing platform.
Absolutely. Thanks for your comment 🙂
Almost $34 dollars for the starter accounts, out of reach for starting blogger. I better spend that money growing my email list but it is worth looking at.
There’s a 14-day free trial, so you can always try it and if it still seems like a waste, cancel your account 🙂
@Nida
Social notice are valuable to know who are supporting or helping us in coming to more crowds, every one of the organizations who are advancing computerized items online are utilizing social notice, in light of the fact that at whatever point I specify some brand name in Twitter they instantly most loved and offer.
regards
rakhi
Yep Rakhi. You’re right. Thanks for your comment 🙂
Nice artiicle,love the tool,its a great one indeed.
Glad you liked the review 🙂
Hi Nida,
Social mentions are useful to know who are supporting or helping us in reaching more audiences, all the companies who are promoting digital products online are using social mention, because whenever I mention some brand name in Twitter they immediately favourite and share that tweet on Twitter.
If we can able to know who are sharing or mentioning our brand on social media then we can reach them to build strong relationship with them, thanks for sharing complete information about this tool, see you soon.
Thanks for your comment 🙂