Start Tracking Your Mentions: A Web-Monitoring Tool

We have lots of tools within our various platforms to help us track who is talking to or about us. We’ve talked about commun.it, Hootesuite and Tweetdeck before, but they can only follow things on a limited basis. In other words, each is geared toward certain social media platforms.

There’s also Google Alerts that will send you an email when your “alert” is mentioned somewhere out on the Internet but it is preferential to things within its search engine.

Today I want to introduce to you a site that puts it all together—Mention. This social media and web-monitoring tool combines the specificity of the above platforms with the power of Google Alerts to display who is talking about you or your books.

The beauty of Mention is that you have the functionality to respond to a mention within the application. Let’s say someone mentioned you in a blog post and you had no idea? Mention will find the source and display it on your screen. From here, you can respond directly, comment, Retweet or post, without having to leave the screen.

I put in an alert for Indies Unlimited and found a tweet by someone announcing that they bought the new 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology (I’ve removed the user info for display purposes.) Notice that there are no @’s or #’s to search with—if you were using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, you would have missed this. With Mention, you now have a chance to Tweet back and thank them for buying your book.

The service is easy to set up and you can use the basic platform that I’ve shown above for free. Of course, if you want to go crazy, they have paid levels that bring a ton more functionality.

The system will prioritize certain mentions based on a host of factors that might include sites with a lot of traffic or number of followers and there’s a rumor that they will be adding Klout scores to the priorities as well.

You have the option to block certain sites, you may want to block your own blog to reduce mentions, after all; you want to hear how others are talking about you or your books, not how you are talking about those things.

Try it and see what you come up with—you might be surprised by what you find. Share with us what you discover. If it can help us find one more constant reader, it’s worth the small time investment to set up Mention.