As we publish more content and make more connections online, it becomes a real task to keep track of conversations about you, your brand and your work. For instance, how would you go about finding out which sites and communities are using your mobile app, and what they’re saying about it? And how would you gauge the influence you have on the web? Whether you’re an internet personality, an ecommerce brand or a content source, monitoring your reach and reputation is key to the growth of your business.
That’s why Mention might be worth a look: this new app tracks keywords and phrases related to your brand across the web and social networks in real-time, and lets you analyze and respond to participants from a single dashboard. It’s kind of like Google Alerts, but on a cocktail of steroids, crack and social media elixirs that make it a powerful tool to manage your brand’s reputation and engage your community easily. Sound like what your business needs? Let’s take Mention for a spin and see if it’s up to the task.
Overview
Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to monitor web and social network sources to find out what’s being said about your brand, and join in on those conversations to connect with customers in real-time. The app also offers collaboration and analytics features, and can be accessed on the web, mobile devices and even desktops. Plus, Mention has a free plan that you can try out before you dive in.
The app displays mentions of your alert in a feed, as well as their context
Getting Started
As a tech journalist working with numerous publications, I find it hard to track my published work across the web, and also need to keep an eye on trending topics in my areas of interest. Mention makes it easy to stay on top of it all with its simple alerts system: create an alert by adding in keywords and exceptions, select sources and list URLs you’d like to block, and that’s it — you’ll instantly get a feed of every mention of your alert in a tidy timeline that you can analyze and respond to from within the app.
Setting up an alert is a cinch
Since I wanted to be notified when my articles were published, I created an alert with my name as the main keyword and included my Twitter handle as an alternative expression. To filter out my own tweets, I set my Twitter profile URL to be blocked as a source. Once I finished creating my alert, Mention began monitoring the web for new instances of my keywords and displayed them as they were posted, including published articles, tweets from others and forum posts.
Fine-tuning an alert’s configuration
Interface and Features
Once you’ve created an alert or two, you’ll be able to view all the mentions for that alert in a scrollable news feed. Clicking on a mention brings up more of its context, such as the web page/blog post of origin, or the conversation that includes the mention, on Facebook or Twitter. Mentions can be favorited, marked as irrelevant or acted upon: you can share or tweet about web pages, or reply/retweet to Twitter mentions. If you’re collaborating with others, you can delegate tasks, like reading and responding to mentions, to team members and track their activity as you go. Plus, you can view statistics such as the distribution of mentions by source, language, periods of time, and also export your mentions and statistics as PDF or XLS spreadsheets.
Reply to tweets right from within the app
Using Mention
Mention isn’t just for vanity searching; individual users can set up the app to discover:
Jobs and internships
Opportunities to volunteer,write a guest post, or join a band
Shopping discounts and coupons
News on their favorite topics/products/celebrities/events
Brand managers and PR professionals can monitor online coverage and conversations of their brands, competition and hot topics in their domains. It’s easy to set up alerts and act on them, so much so that even freelancers and startups with no major prior experience in social media management can get in on the action. However, I did find the app to miss the occasional mention from a few CMS-driven sites.
Select mentions and assign related tasks to team members easily
Pricing
If you want to try Mention, their Free plan allows for 1 user, 250 mentions across 2 alerts that you set up, with mentions refreshed once daily. Paid plans start at $5.83/month for 2,000 mentions across 5 alerts, and there’s a Enterprise plan at $54.16/month with 50,000 mentions across 50 alerts that also includes sentiment analysis, statistics, data export and customized reports, plus collaborative tools for task delegation and team activity tracking. It’s priced about the same as Sprout Social, who have been around for a while and offer a similar feature set.
View detailed statistics to understand where and when mentions are coming from
Conclusion
I tried Mention for over a month and found it to be really easy to work with. If you’re running promotional campaigns, launching or testing a product, seeking feedback from customers, or offering customer support online, this is a great choice for individuals and teams to manage brand correspondence with. The interface could be streamlined a bit more, and I’d love to see more options for sorting and grouping mentions for batch delegation. Other than that, the app works well, looks good and doesn’t take long to get used to. If you’re looking to get to grips with your brand’s online presence without a lot of fuss, this is a great choice.