More About Mention
If you have been tracking your social media or brand mentions on various platforms, you would know how they work.
What is mention? Essentially, every time a user refers to your profile or business, or brand by tagging you, it counts as a social media mention. Not only do mentions generate visibility and publicity (both positive and negative), but they also provide you an opportunity to interact with your followers and customers.
For example, if someone writes a blog post about a product and wants to share it on Facebook, they might tag the Twitter handle of the company or the product in their tweet. For the user, this act of ‘mention’ can help to amplify the visibility and engagement of the tweet and the content.
Mentions can also be made to access customer support. Typically, on social media, customers flag a question or complaint by tagging the social media handle of the company. (Think: Tweets) This serves to draw attention to the issue and have it redressed by the company’s customer support team.
On some social media platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, mentions are made using the “@” symbol followed by the username or handle of the user or account being mentioned. When a user is mentioned in a post, status update, or comment, they will usually receive a notification, enabling them to engage with the content and the conversation.
Sometimes, conversations about a brand or user can happen without tagging and the resultant notification. These, too, count as brand mentions and should be tracked via search to improve follower or customer engagement.
What are the benefits of social media mentions? Social media mentions or brand mentions of your business can act as informal reviews. You can reshare some of the positive brand mentions by customers on your social media page, a form of user-generated content.
Social media mentions can also be a way to monitor feedback and respond to it positively to build good relationships with leads and customers. Furthermore, a brand can mine data and insights from social mentions, including demographics and customers’ expectations of your product/service and the content you put out.
A business can reach out to social media influencers and content creators to generate mentions of products and services and spread the good word about the brand or business.
Here are some ways users can mention brands or businesses on social media:
- Sharing product pictures
- Posting a review or feedback
- Asking for help with a product or service
- Mentioning the brand in articles and comparison posts
- Tagging in memes and video content
Brands can also be tagged on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, among other platforms, by their competitors.
Thus, considering social media is accessed by both consumers and other businesses, you should keep management of brand mentions at the forefront of your social media strategies.
Businesses can easily track their social mentions in the following ways:
- Manually searching on the social media app
- Creating hashtags related to the brand/product and tracking them
- Using social media management tools
The image below illustrates how a mention works on social media. The image is of a Twitter thread between a consumer and the popular rideshare service, Uber. The consumer has tagged and generated a mention of Uber on a complaint.
