B2B Social Media Tools: Monitor Your Brand Online with Mention

When you’re choosing tools for B2B social media measurement … I recommend choosing lightweight vs. heavyweight. Choose agile, affordable and eager. Choose the underdog with something to prove — the company committed to continued improvement.

As I said yesterday, I have tried all the tools for social media monitoring and measurement. I am regularly putting my tools to the test and when I find something better, my loyalty is pretty fragile — I go where the best tools are.

I’ve sat through a lot of demos for sophisticated social media management solutions — you know the big dogs. There are a couple of great, heavyweight tools out there that I have really enjoyed using in short spurts. We’ll talk about those later in the week. For now, I want to talk about a hodge-podge, best in class of agile, effective and lightweight platforms, starting with social media listening tool Mention.

What’s wrong with the other tools?

I don’t know about you — but the brands I monitor social media for don’t have thousands of incoming messages and mentions every day like a popular consumer brand might. As I mentioned yesterday, the demos of the major social solutions usually use example brands like Nike or McDonald’s to show you how effectively they can aggregate data and sort large numbers of incoming messages … But when you get in there in the trial period with your brand and your niche keywords, you can actually see the sound of crickets and hear the pings of duplicate messages.

Some of those tools — not all of them — measure and archive a combination of direct messages on Twitter and Facebook, direct mentions on social (@Username or direct tags on Google+, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), indirect mentions on social (Username (without directly tagging)), and industry-relevant keywords that you set up for monitoring.

They are capable of managing and storing huge amounts of data. So if you’re a brand like Nike, who needs a way to search through mentions, measure sentiment (positive or negative mentions), or have multiple team members available for responding in a social customer service setting, then what you need is stability over innovation. You might need infrastructure that a hodge-podge of lighter solutions can’t provide you.

But if you’re not one of those … then you can get scrappy.

Why I’m a fan of Mention

The results

Mention is the most effective media and social monitoring tool I have used to date. After using no less than five tools in tandem that do the exact same thing … Mention just gave me the results I cared about from the sources I cared about most.

They credit this intangible feeling of “yay” I had based on results to their “anti-noise technology” — which learns from your behavior the types of results you want to see most.

Ease of use

You can access the tool from the desktop application for Windows or Mac, in your browser, or from any device that uses the AppStore or Android Market. So you can use it everywhere.

The interface

I’m a sucker for a simple, good-lookin’ user interface. I tried not to let the UIs of the different tools sway my opinion too far away from the basis of their functionality … but I’m only human, people.

Aside from being purdy, the dashboard of Mention is perfectly easy to use without a single unnecessary piece of that beautifully designed puzzle in place. You’ll use every tool the dashboard offers and you’ll love doing it. Also — there’s a nifty little tutorial when you’re a new user that walks you through the platform so you can be fluent in almost no time on everything you can do with it.

So if you want to go beyond Google Alerts and scrappy DIY monitoring, but you don’t monitor broad-based trends or an ocean of incoming messages deserving of a heavyweight tool, I strongly recommend Mention.

Check out their pricing on their website.

You can also read this great breakdown from Francisco Rosales on SocialMouths.

Let me know what you think when you try it.