Want to know more about social media monitoring? Funny you should mention it…

Sales and marketing professionals are participating in social media more than ever these days. Determining the ROI of this effort remains elusive, but websites like Social Mention, HowSociable, and BlogPulse are helping us monitor coverage more efficiently. And they’re FREE.

Today, we are going to focus on our favorite of the freebie social media monitoring tools: Social Mention.

If you haven’t checked out yet, you should. With a very clean interface, the tool allows you to easily search social media to see where you are mentioned and then evaluates your coverage: Is it positive? Negative? Or neutral?

Other metrics Social Mention offers are:

• Strength. This is the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media.
• Sentiment. This is the ratio of mentions that is positive to negative.
• Passion. This is a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand and will do so repeatedly.
• Reach. This is a measure of the range of your influence.

You will also see how many minutes you average between mention, when your last mention occurred, how many unique authors have mentioned you, how many re-tweets, the most frequently used keywords and more.

Simply enter the term you want to search for and Social Mention searches all data from social media streams and aggregates the results for you. Now, like all searches, there will be some irrelevant results. If you are finding the list to unwieldy to scan, you can further refine your search using their Advanced Search options.

Remember: the more you refine you search, the more meaningful the metrics. That being said, be careful with how much emphasis you put on the metrics themselves. There are just too many variables involved to let them influence your day-to-day operations. We use them for benchmarking, identifying trends, and engaging in more meaningful online conversation—all of which inform our long-term marketing strategy.

Besides the easy-to-use website, Social Mention lets you get your results, real-time, via RSS feed. You can also download them in csv format. Plus, you can sign up for email alerts (similar to Google Alerts) that let you know when and where you were mentioned.

Did we mention that it’s FREE?

Curious? Visit socialmention.com to find out more.

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Go-To-Market Strategies / http://go-to-marketstrategies.blogspot.com/