Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) appears to be a viable tool for those who need to track a brand or topic across the wide variety of social media networks available today. While nowhere near as comprehensive as many of the sophisticated pay tools available, Social Mention does provide both point-in-time reports of mentions of your keywords (with a certain amount of analysis) plus a daily email alert service.
Getting a point-in-time analysis is as easy as entering your keyword on the home page and clicking search. You can filter your results in advance, either by using the dropdown menu of broad categories (blogs, microblogs, networks, etc.) or by clicking “select social media sources and choosing from over 80 popular social media sites. After clicking the search button it may take Social Mention a few minutes to gather results, depending on how popular your keyword is. Once results have been compiled, you arrive at Social Mention’s detailed results dashboard.
The center column lists all the found mentions of your keyword. You can filter by categories (using the links above the search window), by date or source, and by time span. At the left is the analysis of the results. At the top, scores are given for strength (a measure of the likelihood your brand is being discussed in social media, based on the past 24 hours), sentiment (a ratio of perceived positive to negative mentions), passion (a measure of how much talk about your brand is being generated by repeat posters), and reach (a measure of how many unique authors out of all the mentions are generating your buzz).
A series of charts break down sentiment (into percentages of “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative” mentions), top keywords in the mentions, top users who are talking about you, the top hashtags used in those mentions, and the sources of your mentions.
From the right panel, you can set up an RSS feed for tracking this keyword, create an auto-email alert, and download the results in a CSV file.
Back on the home page, you can create daily email alerts for mentions of any keyword, filtered by various social media categories. Social Mention also has an API linked to its data, which is free for less than 100 queries per day (commercial plans for larger use are available).
