What is a social mention tool?

"It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools be used in the right way." – Wallace D. Wattles

When it comes to harnessing the power of social, there are tools involved... tools that help us access the information from the web, search and filter to the content that we need, and save and archive that information for continual referral. Today, there are a variety of tools in the market that can assist with gathering and understanding information from social. Some of the top ones that come to mind are NetBase, Synthesio, Brand24, and Hootsuite Insights.

How social mention tools work

We won't get into all the technicalities of how social media content is mined and stored but, in short, these platforms use crawlers to browse the World Wide Web to index this information systematically. This indexing is done through spidering technology that is programmed to find keyword references. This gets into similar territory as semantic analysis and natural language processing.

Choosing the right social mention tool

Finding a platform you trust is important; however, that's just the first step. Anyone who has gleaned insights using social can tell you — it's less about the tool and more about knowing how to use it, including its limitations and how to get the most out of it. Once you are using one of the top platforms, you know you are mining organic social content. The thing that will separate your insights from the rest is how you wield the sword (social mention tool) of your choosing.

If you are thinking about investing in a social mention tool, you may want to consider the following questions:

• Can it connect you with the platforms you are most interested in retrieving content from?
• Are you comfortable with having AI assist you with your main search, or would you rather handle that manually?
• Do you want (or need) to get your hands dirty with constructing Boolean logic to disambiguate terms or zero-in on specific, niche topics?
• Are you looking for a tool that does it all — searching and filtering? Or would you prefer to pull your main search into a separate text analytics software?
• Do you really want to DIY this? If not, our experts are here to help!

Identifying relevant and insightful consumer behavior requires a level of skill that comes from doing this work daily. Our social analytics experts can design and execute an approach using the right tools to unveil the unfiltered and organic insights your consumers are sharing in social channels.