Media listening isn’t a new idea. It’s been around in various applications. Before social media became a must for brands, tracking what was said about your business through media outlets was already big business.
Adding social media to the mix has exponentially grown the market for monitoring solutions. In fact, market research firm Zion expects to see the media monitoring sphere expand to USD 7,236 million by 2027, up 13.9 per cent from 2018.
But what’s really on offer in this booming market? In this review, we’ll unpack Mention’s solution. Founded in 2012, they’re definitely one of the more seasons solutions out there.
They cater to both enterprise and agency clients, extending their target customers beyond enterprises. While Mentions offers real-time monitoring, they go a little further to include other perfect additional services.
These include:
- Competitive analysis - pick competitors you’d like to track and compare key metrics.
- Social media management - connect your social accounts and use Mention to manage it all.
- Custom insights - use filters and various displays to draw insights on what’s happening around your brand.
- Automated reports - get updates on how your brand is performing. All reports are sent to you via email and are accessible from Mention’s clean and easy-to-use dashboard.
While not a feature or additional service, access to a tool like Mention is perfect for damage control. Its powerful monitoring functionality makes light work of tracking any and all terms you select. Today, as social media and the potential for boycotts and fake news balloon, Mention is undoubtedly well worth investing in to help brand manage their reputations.
They’ve also generated what we think as some very solid results. They have over 750k customers and have delivered over 12 billion mentions to their customer base. Clients include Stripe, Opéra de Bordeaux, Microsoft, and online PR platform My News Desk.
Mention:
The Details
Mention offers four pricing plans:
Solo, $49/mo - Basic account features include 2 basic alerts, 5,000 mentions, 5 social account and 1 user.
Pro, $99/mo - Basic account features include 5 basic alerts, 10,000 mentions, 10 social accounts and 10 users.
Advanced account features include engage, publish, Slack integration, push notifications, search in your mentions, tags, sentiment analysis, influencer dashboard, monitoring analytics and social analytics.
ProPlus, $179/mo - Basic account features include 7 basic and standard alerts, 20,000 mentions, 15 social accounts and unlimited users.
Advanced account features include engage, publish, Slack integration, push notifications, search in your mentions, tags, sentiment analysis, influencer dashboard, monitoring analytics, social analytics, custom reports, account management, data exports, API access, historical data and Facebook crawling.
Company - Includes everything that Mention offers, price upon request.
Basic Features
Mention’s set of basic features are enough to get your feet wet with their platform and learn something new about your brand. Here’s a look at what to expect.
Alerts
Creating alerts involves a number of moving pieces. From your choice of terms to track to which platforms, languages and countries you’d like to gather data on. And as far as covering all bases goes, we think Mention’s done a thorough job.
You can choose to monitor your company or product, a competitor or anything else.
Image: Mention
We’re all about the small details. When examining how Mention handles the creation of alerts, we appreciated the inclusion of realtime search and identification of company names and terms.
Image: Mention
While boolean operators are available, Mention’s also provided users with the option to list required and excluded keywords when creating alerts.
Image: Mention
Booleans Alerts
Boolean alerts are available to make for an even more custom search experience. You can use operators like “AND”, “NOT” and “OR” to narrow down searches. And while that description seems pretty complete, don’t underestimate what you can accomplish with booleans.
According to Mention, you can do much more. You can use 113x more search terms per alert, limit your alerts to specific countries, narrow alerts to certain websites and also account for spelling errors by locating results with various spelling.
Mentions
Mentions are presented in a clean interface. Using the Feed tab, you can keep an eye on all mentions for terms you are tracking. Something worth noting is how intuitive Mention’s interface is.
It’s got an email inbox look and feel. Users Have Inbox, Unread, Priority, Favourites and Social Messages folders. Mentions of your keywords are also conveniently highlighted in yellow, making them easy to spot.
Image: Mention
Social Account
While the number of social accounts you can link varies by pricing plan, the ability to connect and manage social conversations is a smart addition. You save time by not having to toggle between Mention and any other social management solution.
You can connect multiple Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin social accounts. Mention’s also made it possible to toggle between different Facebook Global Pages or manage other social media accounts with a few simple clicks - an ideal solution for busy agencies and large multinationals.
Users
Based on plan restrictions, you’re able to assign users with full access to Mentions functionality.
Advanced Features
While some of the most critical features are listed and available as basic features, Mention’s advanced feature set is definitely worth paying for if you can afford them.
Engage
Engage is the apps communication tool. It allows you to reply to messages and posts where your brand or term is featured. As you’d imagine, this is a powerful social selling enabler or reputation management safeguard.
Publish
Covered earlier, the ability to publish content in Mention makes for a seamless social media management experience. Users get a clean calendar that shows social media accounts integrated and when content is scheduled to be published.
Image: Mention
Slack Integration
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without Slack. And when it comes to Mention, the integration of these two apps is almost as good as it gets.
When connected, you can:
- Receive real-time notifications in any Slack channel
- Customize notifications to only receive mentions from influential websites and users
- Receive a daily digest email with a summary of what you’re monitoring
Image: Mention
Pulse Notifications
Keeping track of brand and keyword mentions is what monitoring is all about. But what makes Pulse unique is its ability to notify you sudden increases or decreases in the usage of terms you’re tracking.
This feature is ideal for damage control, allowing teams to quickly get ahead of narratives, leaving nothing to chance.
Search in your mentions
It’s great being able to track terms, but what about digging a little deeper to see how and where your terms are used in alert results?
The ability to search in your mentions makes it possible to derive a little more than just who’s mentioned you. You gain context that can be useful when choosing a response.
Tags
Another clever and convenient feature Mention’s released is Tags. They help you categorise content, making it easier to manage alerts - handy if you receive tons weekly.
Tagging can also be automated and based on keywords you’re tracking. While you can manually assign tags, you’ll find the automatic tagging a major timesaver. While automated tagging is a godsend, you’ll need to create tags initially to get started.
Image: Mention
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a perfect addition to Mention. Found under the Insight Center tab, you can generate reports that indicate the amounts of positive, negative and neutral sentiment around terms you’re tracking.
Image: Mention
Influencer Dashboard
Tracking how influencers impact your brand is essential. It can provide the opportunity to partner with the right names and position your brand for more success.
Mention makes it easy to track who’s speaking about your brand. While the scope of social platforms is limited to Twitter, you are able to gather helpful data.
The dashboard includes a list of influencers, their follower count, location, interests and an influence rating out of 100.
Image: Mention
Monitoring Analytics
Want to know how your brand is performing online, excluding social media? Monitoring analytics provides data from all the sites included when creating your alerts. Analytics feature sentiment analysis, competitor monitoring, identification of related topics your audience is talking about and more.
Social Analytics
Social analytics help you track conversations happening about your brand on social media. As with web analytics, you can also track sentiment and competitors. Also included is reach, audience demographics and more.
Custom Reports
Providing a tool as powerful as Mention would make little sense without equally strong reporting functionality.
Mention offers visualisations showing mention volume over time and identifies and lists topics your audience is talking about. You’re able to use this information and more to uncover trends, reach, influence scores and demographics of your audience.
Image: Mention
Account Management
While account management is only available to Enterprise customers, Mention’s gone the distance by creating all the how-to content other plan users will find helpful. To access their trove of helpful content, you’ll need to create an account.
Data Exports
There’s a good chance that you’ll want to dissect data Mention’s offered even further. To help, they’ve created the option to export various data sets, from a list of Twitter influencers to mentions identified. Exports can be in PDF, CSV or TSV.
API Access
Need additional functionality or want to build a custom tool that leverages Mentions feature set? Integrating their API can help you create your own monitoring tool, add additional features and functionality to your products or access more data to make reporting more insightful.
Historical Data
Mention and other monitoring tools are perfect for real-time monitoring. While it may seem as though real-time tracking all you need, they’ve created a way to locate and present historical data.
The idea is that historical data is filled with gems. Business can identify opportunities around their brands, products and services. This includes research to create stronger pitches for clients and building more accurate competitor analysis reports.
Image: Mention
Facebook crawling
Facebook is known to be one of the first places unhappy customers turn to. Mention’s Facebook crawling functionality gives brands a complete view of all mentions for terms they are tracking on Facebook.
Conclusion
Mention’s developed a powerful tool. The ability to create highly-targeted alerts makes for easier tracking, especially for large brands who don’t have time to wade through irrelevant content. It’s reporting features and dashboards are intuitive and easy-to-use, creating an almost seamless look and feel that users will appreciate.
We also think that incorporating social media management was a smart move. This functionality along with their API and Slack integrations give businesses the opportunity to elevate their participation online.
Overall, we recommend considering Mention if you’re in the market or a new media monitoring tool. Its list of features includes everything you’ll need to make a noticeable impact online.
Rating: 4.8
Services offered: Configurable alerts, competitive analysis, social media management, media monitoring, custom insights and automated reporting, influencer scoring, sentiment analysis, trend tracking customer engagement, reputation management
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