Social Listening: Track Public Mentions of Your Brand

Overview

Social listening looks for public mentions of the terms you track and puts them in one feed.

• Your terms. Your brand, product names, competitors, hashtags and keywords, with exclusions for words that mean a mention is not about you.
• Public sources. News through Google News, Hacker News, your own Google Alerts feeds, any blog or forum RSS feed you add, and Reddit and YouTube where they are available on the platform (see below).
• Every mention attributed. Each one names the source, the publication or community, and the author's public handle where the source shows one, and links to the original.
• Sentiment and topics. Each mention is rated positive, neutral, negative or mixed and tagged with topics such as price, shipping or customer service. You can correct any rating.
• Alerts and digest. Be told about negative mentions and spikes, and get a daily or weekly summary by email.
• Reply where it was said. Each mention has a link to the original post, where you reply under your own account on that site.

Plan and access. Social listening is included in the Scale plan. Owners, admins and managers can read the feed and change what is tracked. Staff roles without marketing access do not see it.

Track your terms

1. Open Insights → Social listening.
2. Under What you track, choose a kind (Brand, Product, Competitor, Hashtag or Keyword), type the term and click Add.
3. Add exclusions to a term for words that mean a mention is about something else. For a brand called "Juniper", you might exclude "juniper berries" and "gin".
4. Pause a term to stop matching it without losing its exclusions, or remove it.

How matching works:

• A term matches as a whole phrase, ignoring upper and lower case and accents: "café lune" matches "Cafe Lune" but not "cafelune".
• A hashtag term such as #cafelune matches the hashtag or the bare word.
• A mention is kept when at least one active term appears in its title or text and none of that term's exclusions do. Words under Alerts & settings → Always ignore drop a mention for every term.

You can track up to 25 terms.

Where we look

The Where we look card shows each source and when it was last checked. Sources are checked about every hour (YouTube once a day). You can switch any source off.

We only use official APIs and feeds, within their published terms and rate limits. We do not scrape web pages, and we honour a site's robots.txt when reading its feed.

Add a Google Alerts feed

1. Go to Google Alerts and create an alert for your term.
2. Click Show options and set Deliver to to RSS feed, then click Create Alert.
3. Next to the alert, click the RSS icon and copy the address.
4. In Social listening, click Add a Google Alerts or RSS feed, choose Google Alerts feed, paste the address and click Add feed.

Add an RSS feed

Choose RSS or Atom feed and paste the feed address. Before it is saved we check that it is a public website, that the site allows feed readers in its robots.txt, and that the address really is a feed. You can add up to 15 feeds.

The mention feed

• Filter by source, sentiment, term, or search the text.
• Click a mention's title, or the reply link (for example Reply on Reddit), to open the original.
• Hide mentions that are not relevant; they move to Show hidden and can be unhidden.
• Rate corrects a mention's sentiment. Your rating replaces the automatic one.

The same article published under several addresses shows once, and each address is only ever stored once.

The Mentions over time chart shows how many mentions were found each day for the last 30 days, by sentiment.

Sentiment and topics

Each new mention's title and snippet are rated automatically for sentiment towards your terms and tagged with up to three topics. Before the text is sent to the text-analysis provider on our published sub-processor list, email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers are removed. Ratings can be wrong; correct them with Rate.

To keep mentions unrated, switch off Rate sentiment and topics automatically under Alerts & settings. The feed, filters, spike alerts and digest keep working; negative-mention alerts need ratings.

Alerts and the digest

Open Alerts & settings:

• Negative mentions. You are told once about each negative mention published in the last 48 hours, in one notification per check however many there are. Older posts found the first time you track a term do not trigger alerts.
• Spikes. You are told when mentions published in the last 24 hours reach at least your minimum and are several times your usual daily level (the average of the 7 days before). Spike alerts start after three days of listening, once there is a usual level to compare with.
• Email digest. Daily, or weekly on Monday, from 08:00 in your store's time zone, only when something new was found.

Alerts go to owners, admins and managers, in the dashboard and by email. Each person chooses where under Settings → Notifications.

Check now

Check now looks at your sources straight away, at most once every 10 minutes. A source that has been failing waits until its next retry.

Limits

To stay within each source's rate limits, every store has daily limits: up to 500 new mentions and 300 automatic ratings a day. When a source fails, it is retried later, waiting longer after each failure, up to a day. Its status shows on the Where we look card.

Your data

Tracked terms, feeds and mentions are part of your account data and included in your data export. Mentions are public posts; we store the title, a short snippet, the link, the source and the author's public handle where the source shows one.