Don’t Forget to ‘Mention’ It

Social media is becoming increasingly important for marketing research. Aside from using such venues for recruiting research participants, content analysis of the social conversation can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior. With over 1.28 billion users on Facebook, 500 million tweets sent every day, 200 million monthly active users on Instagram and over 400 million Snapchat snaps shared per day (Digital Insights, 2014); social media allows vast and immediate access to the groundswell of public and, often, private opinion.

Monitoring the social conversation in marketing research will reveal consumer insight in to their thoughts on your business, industry and individual products. According to Blakeman (2010), monitoring “discussions of you and your services or products is essential if you are to nip bad press in the bud. Respond appropriately and you can turn negative feedback into a positive story.” It may also be possible to uncover valuable insight in to product improvements and consumer engagement tactics. According to Byrne (2014), media monitoring allows you to:

§  Tap into conversations about your brand, even when people are not talking directly to you

§  Identify other terms related to your brand and how they’re being used

§  Identify trending topics and hashtags — conversations you should be taking part in

§  Where they’re happening — both in terms of platforms and channels and geo-location

§  What languages these conversations are happening in

§  Who’s leading and influencing these conversations

            Mention, a social media and web-monitoring tool, allows you to set alerts based on keywords and view content related to those keywords directly within the tool’s application. According to Cleary (2013), “when you monitor and track keywords, you can find potential business, build relationships with new people and respond quickly to situations that could damage your brand.”

            Mention alerts are easy to setup. You can add any keywords or filters you’d like to narrow your search. For example, if you are looking for the social conversation surrounding “craft beer” you would filter your list with the advanced setting of ALL. Mention users can also filter what sources you are actually looking to monitor. I’ve found it works best to turn off notifications from the web (i.e. articles) and filter only social networks for a true look at the social conversation.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Iowa Beverage Systems, a beer distribution company here in central Iowa, can use Mention to monitor changes in their brand recognition, beer consumption and alcoholic beverage industry, as well as to gather audience insight and content related to each of the brands they distribute.

(Source: “Iowa Beverage Systems: Beer” Mention, 2014)

            Iowa Beverage Systems could set up alerts to monitor the terms “beer”, “craft beer” and “drinking” in order to gather audience insight. As in the photos above, Iowa Beverage Systems can conclude the terms are used often across social media channels with over 3,000 mentions in under 12 hours. It is also obvious that Twitter is a primary source for the social conversations on “beer”. From these insights, Iowa Beverage Systems should consider monitoring Twitter more closely and activating users through the social network more often than other networks like Facebook.

            The Mention dashboard is an easy to use interface sorting mentions by priority, favorites, relevance and more. According to Karl (2014), “you have the option to mark mentions as favorites, send them to trash or flag them as irrelevant. Anytime you mark a mention as irrelevant, you’ll stop receiving mentions from that source – it’s a good way to further filter results and cut down on the noise.” Can you think of a thread in your business’ social conversation that you’d want to filter in order to cut through the noise?

Mention should be used in tandem with Google Analytics to get a full picture of consumer interaction with your business through social media. Where Mention provides insight and response in to the social conversation within all social networks, Google Analytics provides insight in to which social channels are sending the most qualified visitors to your website and further insight in to only some “partnered” networks.

(Source: Google Analytics, 2014)

            According to Melissa Baker, author of Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach, “Having a comparison of the user drop-off rates across all channels is helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of what is working and what is not. Knowing the number of visits each channel sent along is not enough to gauge the true success of your messaging” (Peyton, 2012). This social visitors flow also outlines a visitor’s journey through your conversion funnel, providing a quick analysis and check that channels are indeed leading consumers toward a conversion.

            Activity stream within Google Analytics is the most direct comparable feature to what you’ll receive in using Mention. Unfortunately, it only works within lesser known social channels such as Digg, Echo, Delicious and Google+. According to Peyton (2012), “Activity Stream allows you to view individual post/page analytics, the content on Google Ripples, the actual content and the social activity. With one click, you can jump to the interaction and respond, follow the user and monitor conversations about your content.” With the real-time insights and capabilities, it is too bad that Google falls short in playing nice with the two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter. Mention covers them all and in 42 languages (Karl, 2014).

            As a business you are looking to increase conversions. Where Mention allows you to track successes and challenges within the social conversation, Google Analytics will track the lead to conversion once a user visits your website. By setting up GOALS within your account, you’ll be able to begin tracking each conversion. According to Peyton (2012), “With only a few clicks, you can quickly start tracking how social traffic helps drive website conversions or events. This can include obvious conversions such as an online purchase or lead form completion, but it can also include micro-conversions such as video views or blog visits.”

(Source: Peyton, Lisa. (2012) Social Media Examiner.)

            Between Mention and Google Analytics, social marketing efforts can be tracked from beginning to end, inside and out. This gives you as a marketer both the broadest and deepest insights for analysis and interpretation. It all starts with a measurable objective. Once an objective is set, track your strategy using both tools to draw the strongest conclusions for optimization.