Is Mention Better Than Google Alerts for Brand Monitoring?
They’re saying it’s Google Alerts on steroids. French startup Mention claims to be the next great thing in social media marketing and brand monitoring (and with half a million users already, its looking to fulfill that prophecy). And Google Alerts, a service that has not been updated or touched by Google since 2003) right now does not have the best PR given it has recently announced Google Reader is no more and various press have reported that Google Alerts is broken.
The future of Google Alerts is Mention, a service that can get as much data on your brand as Google Alerts can, but can filter and organize it exponentially better. Mention is a media and social media marketing tool that monitors social sources (news sites, forums, blogs, social networks) to give you real-time and push notifications of new mentions of your brands.
Similar to Hootsuite, it allows you to assign tasks to your team members via the mention (retweet a mention, reply to a Tweet, comment on a blog article, etc.). Unlike Hootsuite, you can get it as a web app, desktop app (mac, PC, linux), Chrome app, iPhone app, Android app and iPad customized web app.. You can also specify what you want searched (Web, Facebook, Twitter, news, blogs, videos, forums and images) and enter “Blocked Sites” such as your own.
What To Track On Mention:
- Your brand name
- Hashtags
- Competitor names
- Questions about your niche
- Guest post opportunities (try phrases like “write for us” and “submit guest post”)
Mention is hyping up their Anti-Noise Technology the most, which is a fancy term for what Google Alerts was doing as well. This lets you either see everything with your keywords, or just the top priority ones (big sites, popular blogs, etc.). Mention says it’s “based on bayesian filters and machine learning that will sort only relevant mentions for our customers.” The priority inbox algorithm calculates the authority of the source to filter important mentions accordingly as well.
