David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Social Mentions with socialmention

By

check out socialmention.com

One social media tracking tool I’ve been using for the library lately is SocialMention, at socialmention.com.

From their about page – “Social Mention … allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.”

So how do I use it? In the search box, I did a search for topeka library – that search catches most of the variations of my library’s name (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library). Most people tend to tweet or Facebook phrases like “headed to Topeka to visit the library” or “Topeka has a great library.” Or they might mention “Topeka Public Library.”

I don’t narrow the search, though you can. If you want, you can create separate searches for blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, etc. And this becomes more important in the next paragraph…

… because each search has an RSS feed and/or an email alert that goes along with it. So what I do is this – I do that topeka library search, then subscribe to the email alerts.

What’s this get me? Every morning, I get an email from Social Mention with a list of mentions of the library with links to the original. I usually get tweets and Facebook status updates, some Foursquare checkins, and some blog mentions. Honestly, there’s a lot of blog spam mentions that appear as well. Also any time we’re mentioned in the media, that comes through, too.

Then I click through each link, answer any questions that appear (not too many), sometimes add a comment to a discussion, and send any interesting media mentions to our marketing manager and maybe our deputy director. I also copy/paste the more interesting mentions into a semi regular staff intranet blog post, so staff can see who’s saying what about us.

So… why am I doing this? I’m a digital branch manager – it helps me keep track of what people are saying about the library via their favorite digital spaces. It also lets me quickly see just what digital spaces people are using (Topekans definitely favor Twitter and Facebook right now).

I recommend checking out socialmention.com – there’s probably a whole lot more you can do with it!

Comments

  5. Excellently written article, if only all bloggers offered the same content as you, the internet would be a much better place. Please keep it up!

  6. This is what I was exploring for a long time! Thank you very much for this article around college! One day someone pronounce that In union there is power. Our high trained company can support you in writing custom essays.

  8. Tried out Social Mention. Compared to Kurrently, it did miserably. I tried using just the library’s name then the library’s name and the location. Got better results using just the name. Go figure.

  9. KL – glad you tried out Social Mention and that you like Kurrently! There’s a pretty big difference between the two: Kurrently ONLY searches Twitter and Facebook; Social Mention does both those PLUS the web, so it also pulls in mentions in flickr, on blogs, etc.

    But that said, Kurrently seems to work fine, too!

  11. I tried Social Mention and put our library’s name in several ways. Over a process of 3 weeks, there might have been 2 mentions buried in all the unrelated return hits Social Mention forwarded to me. At the same time, I used other platforms and got many more mentions forwarded to me from them. I have now stopped using Social Mention due to too much clutter and not enough related hits.

  12. I think Social Mention is a great way to track who mentions the library. I use Google Alerts as well.

  13. intmdw RT @DappereBas: handige tool om te checken wat over iets gezegd wordt + waar. http://birezilyafonu.com #yam

Trackbacks