Anytime someone talks about your brand in the online world, it counts as a social mention. The term 'mention' refers to users tagging a page (@mention) on social media platforms. Social media managers understand that not all brand mentions are tagged. They might have to hunt for ones that escape the radar.
For the uninitiated, tracking social mentions is part of social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is an ongoing task that involves identifying talks surrounding the brand.
Part of this process is tracking hashtags and brand mentions. The most obvious need to track social media mentions is to answer customer queries. But tracking social mentions is essential for reasons more than one.
Let us see today how brands should track brand mentions on social media and how to tackle them in order to maintain a better online brand reputation. But before that, let us first understand why are social mentions so important for a brand.
Table Of Contents:
- Why Are Social Mentions Important?
- How To Track Mentions On Social Media?
- How To Respond To Social Mentions?
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
TL;DR
How To Track Mentions On Social Media?
Brands can track their social mentions either manually by logging into each social media app and creating relevent alerts or using social monitoring tools like Statusbrew.
Why Are Social Mentions Important?
Tracking social mentions helps you respond to your online audience, interact with them and develop engagement tactics. It's also an opportunity to show your brand's commitment to customer service, sales, and user engagement.
Create User-generated Content
Good user interactions pave the way for user-generated content. A positive review or a funny comeback makes for great content. User reviews or posts can be shared as a post on the brand page or even used to run sponsored ads on social media. Here's a tweet of Maybelline sharing a user's content on its page.
.@antoniobtwo serving face rockin’ our #citybronzer! ? #mnyitlook https://t.co/fJ0jDgq0k8
— Maybelline New York (@Maybelline) April 21, 2019
Who Can Mention Your Brand On Social Media?
Anyone from customers, meme pages, and social media influencers to critics can talk about you on various social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. According to a Salesforce report, 76% of consumers look for consistent reactions. Therefore, tracking social media mentions becomes crucial to customer retention and trust.
Pro-tip: Customer shoutouts can be repurposed and reshared for engagement on slow days.
Handle Social Media Crisis With Ease
Tracking mentions of your brands lets you respond to product/service-related complaints and crises. As social media is an accessible platform for users and brands alike, you should expect customer queries on this front.
Monitoring mentions on your brands' socials is imperative during social media campaigns. It helps brands gauge customer reactions and engagement with their content. This is also useful in collecting data to analyze the effectiveness of your content strategy.
How To Track Mentions On Social Media?
Brands can track their social mentions either manually, by creating relevent hashtags or using tools. Let us now understand each method in detail.
Manual Search
If a user has tagged you on a social media network, you will receive a notification in the social media app. Every social platform has a different user interface, but there is a designated notifications button.
Entering your brand name or brand-relevant hashtags in the search bar is the straightforward way. Here's an example of how one can do so on Instagram:
Doing that will show you conversations where your brand has been mentioned. Remember that users may not always tag your account. They might misspell your brand. Although this is possible, it may not be the most efficient operating method.
A social media management tool like Statusbrew lets you monitor conversations across social platforms - even those that don't have explicit page mentions. Hiring Statusbrew can help you stay on top of your social media game.
Book a free demo today to learn more about Statusbrew!
You'll be surprised to see that no search query is too complex for us.
Create Relevant Hashtags
Proactively creating hashtags for your brand ensures that your brand retains some control over conversations. In 2018 Nike made a polarising move featuring the controversial NFL player Colin Kaepernick.
Kaepernick infamously took the knee during the preseason game of September 2016, which led to him being unassigned for the next two years. The player's public life was mired in disputes and court hearings. Cut to 4 September 2018, and Twitter woke up to this:
Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018
Users against Kapernick's act and the subsequent Nike endorsement flooded the platform with #BoycottNike. This was met with tweets with the hashtag #JustDoIt in support of the Kaepernick-Nike collaboration.
By starting the dialogue with #JustDoIt, brands mobilized support for its cause. More importantly, Nike ensured a mode of tracking favorable tweets.
Integrated Workflow Tools
Managing your social media platforms and tracking mentions helps you streamline your workflow. To ensure there are no loose ends in identifying mentions, get your socials under one roof. This is especially useful for searching brand mentions where you haven't been @mentioned by the consumer.
Read more: How To Develop A Social Media Approval Workflow For Your Brand
Statusbrew lets your social media team keep tabs on brand-related dialogues, engage with customers and analyze audience sentiments.
The engagement can be sorted based on categories using tags, allowing social media manager to assign tags, both, manually and automatically, based on conditions and document outcomes.
For example, during a social media crisis, you might want to prioritize mentions tending to negative sentiments. You may assign a higher priority to mentions under that specific category if you've just launched a new campaign.
You could even integrate Statusbrew with your existing CRM tools to plan your lead generation process and focus on customer retention. Here's an example of the scope of identifying leads from brand mentions for a brand selling pet collars.
Video source: The Good Hype Official
A content creator posted this reel on Instagram using the brand's (Niteize) product. This can be classified as user generated content. A brand's UGC is 30% more effective in leaving a lasting impression on users than other content posted by the brand themselves.
Plus, the comments under this video allow the brand to generate leads. It's up to the brand to offer a welcome discount or craft a personalized message. The steps taken should be in line with the company's marketing strategy.
Bonus Content: 3 Ways To Get Google Reviews Deleted [Always Work]
Clubbing Statusbrew into your existing workflow helps with more than just tracking mentions. It enables sales conversion, collaborations, and identifying organic content. Also, you can use it to track and monitor brand mentions on Twitter.
Statusbrew's Brand Keywords feature lets you know how people are reacting to your brand, product, or a popular topic beyond your social feed. You can search for keywords, hashtags, and even competitor brands to uncover trends, analyze sentiment, and respond quickly in real-time on Twitter.
How To Respond To Social Mentions?
Here's what you need to keep in mind when responding to social mentions:
- Do not ignore your brand's social media mentions or reviews.
- Do not indiscriminately delete comments you don't like.
- Mentions - whether they're positive or negative, merit your response. Hence, it is important to respond to social mentions because it is a customer communicating with the brand, even if it isn't direct.
- Let's say you get a negative review. Identify the source of the problem and a possible remedy. The critical thing to understand here is it's not an exercise of winning the exchange. The brand must come out looking good - setting the response's goal and tone.
Read our detailed guide on what to do with bad social media reviews
How To Respond To Social Mentions With Statusbrew: The Easy Way
Statusbrew's Engage feature allows you to filter social mentions based on network. You can add tags to conversations for quick identification, add internal notes for team members, assign the conversation to a member, and do a lot more on the Engage dashboard.
In Conclusion
Keeping up with mentions on your brand's socials might seem like an uphill task. It doesn't have to be that way. Using a social media management tool like Statusbrew ensures you never miss a user comment or review. Statusbrew's monitoring tool helps track mentions across platforms and analyze audience sentiment.
Reaching out to online audiences who talk about you is also a great engagement tactic. This enables social listening and strategic engagement. It is not just about tracking social media mentions. You could eventually build a community that could become brand evangelists.
Book a free trial of Statusbrew today to start monitoring your brand mentions on social media!
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google My Business.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
What's the difference between tagging and mentioning on Instagram?
An Instagram mention is accomplished by using the @ symbol in front of an Instagram username in a comment or caption. Tagging on Instagram is done on the image of your original post.
How do you monitor brand mentions on social media?
Social brand mentions can be monitored manually by logging into each platform or even by creating your brand hashtags and keeping a check on it regularly. This process is quite tedious, hence its best to use a social monitoring tool like Statusbrew. Statusbrew alerts you about what people say about your brand on social media and engagements.
How are social media mentions counted?
Social media mentions are counted as the total number of mentions of your brand on different social media platforms over a given period of time (week or month). You can use a social media monitoring tool like Statusbrew to track online mentions.
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