Using Social Mention to Measure Share of Voice

Customer Sentiment Credit: Wikipedia

Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool.  It is a basic tool and is good for business owners who want to monitor and measure social media.  This tool can help your business measure share of voice and sentiment.  You can also monitor it in real-time.

Share of voice is also known as the number of conversations about your brand versus your competitors.  You need to design a monitoring program to track your brand and your competitor’s mentions over a certain time period.  Assign each mention into a positive, negative or neutral sentiment group.  Each group should have an assigned weight so that you can calculate an average sentiment.  So how does it work?

Real-time Twitter sentiment (Photo credit: robhawkes)

Here is a step-by-step method when using Social Mention:

• At Social Mention search box type in the business name in quotes and make sure “All” appears in the next box.  Then click search.   E.g.  “Business ABC” in ALL hit search.  You can also choose your social media sources.
• View “mentions” on the top right.  E.g. Results 1-10 of 30 mentions.  Adjust the date range to suit your needs.  Scan through the mentions to  see the remarks and by whom.  Advisable to read some of the comments by clicking on them.  Green dot is a positive mention and pink dot is a negative mention in the list of mentions.
• There is a “sentiment” panel on the left side.  The positive, negative and neutral sentiment should equal the mentions on the top right.  Record these on a spreadsheet and repeat the process with your competitor/s.
• Calculating the share of voice.

(+ve mentions)+(neutral mentions)/(total mentions for all the businesses)

• Use a 5pt scale to calculate the average sentiment i.e. +ve=5, neutral=3 & -ve=1

(+ve mentionsx5)+(neutral mentionsx3)+(-ve mentions)/total company mentions

• For a better picture use a pie chart

English: Screenshot of the social media toolbox for fundraising (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Social Mention also shows Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach.  Place the cursor on each one to see what they mean.  Other things that it gives insights into are Top Keywords, Top Users, Top Hashtags and Sources.  Have you used Social Mention?  Is it a monitoring tool you would suggest to someone?  What other social monitoring tools do you use?

Special thanks to Ron Jones in helping me understand Social Mention.

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About Christopher Seeto

A Brand Enhancer in Communications. I fit naturally with technology, curious about science and avid consumer of news to gain insights. You can follow me on Google+ , LinkedIn , Twitter .