Healthy person social monitoring: free mention tracking tools

In the world of startups and small projects, good marketing is traditionally considered one of the main conditions for a successful launch. Many disagree with this, and a recent article on the cons of working in startups details the challenges of marketing costs and their dire consequences. We will not discuss them in detail, but concentrate on one small task that will help you understand how your product has entered the community and how often people pay attention to it. It’s about monitoring brand mentions; since startups / pet projects have little money and we are trembling over every penny, we will consider only free options.

In general, monitoring social networks itself is a piece of enormous depth and complexity. There is an outrageous number of paid dashboards showing engagement metrics that can integrate into your CRM or even replace it, and so on. Their main drawback is that they are all expensive. Some are very expensive. While these miraculous services with a dozen habr codebase boast of collaborating with Fortune 500 companies, we will look at free counterparts for specific simple actions.

Social listening

The problem with these trackers is that they all search on a fairly limited list of sites, but they don’t work very well with custom links. As a result, for good coverage, you need to collect a zoo of applications that together can produce the desired result. But it’s free!

Usecases:

  • Participate in the discussion of your brainchild by tracking mentions in threads
  • Monitor your reputation by responding to negative reviews and encouraging positive ones
  • Monitor competitors and their mentions
  • Receive free leads by simply sending a link in response to a mention
  • Follow updates and news of interesting projects, for example, to be the first to react to news about the divorce of Tinkov and Yandex
  • … and many similar processes

PMAlerts

Initially, I was so impressed with the declared features of this service that I was ready to write only about it – but it turned out that so far only the Twitter search really works and for everything else, you need to use other services. On the other hand, the project is in beta and we should expect the search for other services to be refined, so for me it is the most interesting of all. Judge for yourself, support is declared:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • Github
  • HackerNews
  • StackOverflow
  • Quora
  • Blind
  • And the most delicious of any custom sites!

Moreover, in addition to a convenient dashboard, there are a whole bunch of notification delivery methods:

  • Email
  • SMS
  • RSS
  • Webhooks (!)
  • Slack
  • Teams
  • Telegram
  • and Discord

In general, it is clear from the set of resources that PMAlerts is mainly aimed at technical products, and not at abstract corporate marketing. This will make him the best tool for our task … when he learns to search somewhere other than twitter 🙁

Mention

As the name suggests, Mention also specializes in mention tracking, and they also grabbed a cool domain. Unlike PMAlerts, this is not a beta side project, but a full-fledged service with extensive experience and a professional approach (and there are also large clients, for example, Microsoft). At the same time, he differs from his colleagues in the shop, the marketing monsters with licenses up to $ 20,000 / year: he has a completely free, almost uncut version! As part of a free account, you can use one alert, track up to three accounts in social networks with a total volume of up to 1000 mentions. For a novice player or non-commercial use this is quite enough, but for an additional tracker, you will have to create a new account. Mention can:

  • Follow Twitter, Facebook, any social network and in general any site
  • Of course, notify about new mentions / reactions
  • Evaluate the relevance of a publication or an influencer rating
  • Sort, ban, tag individual sources
  • Manually mark the reaction: there is no expensive and clunky neural network, so you can put the “positive / neutral / negative” assessment yourself
  • “Vesti” social networks, which means postponed posting on the calendar


There are also funny moments. Good thing there is a spam button

Boardreader

It’s simple – it’s a search engine. Let the first one throw a stone at me who has never entered the name of their project into Google 🙂
Unlike Google, it is not clogged with moronic SEO articles, but is willingly clogged with SEO offers of promotional codes and other nonsense. But then everything is normal, and the results are formed differently than in the search engines known to me, there is a higher chance of stumbling upon something useful.


Real SERPs started by the end of the second page

Mentionmapp

Mentionmapp draws a subscription graph and hashtags associated with a Twitter account. You will get tired of checking your account quickly, but in combination with other services it gives a cool synergy: you can study the author’s social connections by mentions and reactions in threads and find cool dudes or loyal users there. In addition, you can initially move through the cool and popular accounts in order to understand through whom you can draw their attention to your product.

Social Buzz

Social Buzz is one of the services of the social-searcher.com website, which is not as well-known and premium as Mention, in the paid versions it costs less and gives more, and even in the free version it provides the most extensive and relevant search results of all the services that I tested. Works all over the Internet, provides 100 requests a day for free, which is enough for all imaginable needs. The results are displayed in the form of an endless feed (brr), the service can highlight social networks and search in a given language. In addition to the issue, there are also statistics, which display:

  • Distribution of activity by dates, days, weeks and times
  • Comparative coverage by social networks and websites
  • The ratio of positive / negative reactions by platform
  • Number of unique users by platform
  • Distribution by content type
  • Keywords

All of these features are fully available and free, making Social Buzz the undisputed champion of free monitoring.

Conclusion

In general, I went to understand the mention-services only to choose monitoring for my site-project, but in the process of searching I found many cool and convenient use cases that I am going to use in my everyday mode – for example, I will try to collect all my subscriptions in one place and form them a single feed (should I make an RSS version?). And of course, for the initial purpose – monitoring a startup or project – synergy from services perfectly replaces an expensive service with round-the-clock support, integrations and costs exceeding the server budget. That’s cool.


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