If monitoring isn’t part of your marketing team’s routine yet, here are a few reasons why it plays a vital role in the success of many teams like yours. Applied methodically and rigorously, it provides invaluable data that contributes to insight-driven decision-making on a wide range of marketing issues: skillful management of a brand’s reputation, instant and useful competitive analysis, or close monitoring of the impact of marketing or PR campaigns. The data provided by web and social monitoring ultimately enables you to develop more refined marketing strategies.
We care about our users, so, to make it easier for them to achieve their marketing goals, our monitoring team has completely rebuilt our basic alert creation. Walk with us through this interview of Nicolas, Product Manager of the monitoring squad to get a deeper understanding of how they are going to make monitoring simple.
Hello Nicolas, can you tell us a bit about your squad?
Hello Raïssa! The monitor squad is the heart of our social monitoring product, and I joined the squad several months ago. We cover several topics, the first of which is data accessibility, in other words, defining the sources to which we connect the product. Today, we have social networks and the web among our sources, and it’s essentially written mentions that we extract from these sources. To give a concrete example, today we’re able to find mentions of a brand or a keyword on YouTube, for example, based on the title of the video. In the very near future, the question will arise of retrieving more and more mentions in video and audio format without the help of the title or description. The second topic is data retrieval: once all the connections have been made with our web app to have a maximum number of sources, how do we enable users to search for data on our interface? The last topic is the presentation of the data, and in particular the mentions retrieved for a given alert. With us, this takes the form of a feed.
What is the new basic alert in a sentence, and who is this targeting?
“A didactic and intuitive interface combining two search modes: keyword search and entity search.”
— Nicolas, Product Manager
I’d say that whatever their social monitoring use case is, users will be able to create an alert that suits them via a didactic and intuitive interface combining two search modes: a keyword search and an entity search. What I mean by “entity search” is that for a given company or even public figure, it’s possible to track virtually all associated social networks, as well as customer review sites.
It’s perfect for all users, in fact, because it’s easy to learn. It addresses all Mention use cases: brand health, competitive analysis, campaign, or event tracking…. All of this with a clear explanation of the search mode used, so that more precise results can be obtained without necessarily having any advanced knowledge of query creation.
How does this feature solve the target needs?
Among the problems reported to us, the main one was the massive influx of mentions in the feed. One of the reasons for this was that the search modes used at the time of creation were not made sufficiently explicit. With the new basic alert, we’ve taken a more didactic approach to alert creation. This allows our users to limit the number of mentions collected, but above all, to significantly improve their quality. And this is especially true with the new built-in assistant!
Interesting! And how does this assistant work?
The assistant, as its name suggests, is there to give the user a helping hand in refining their search. As the user enters keywords, the assistant will automatically recommend the following optimizations: keywords associated with the search (whether positive or negative), top hashtags from social networks and top countries to target that keyword.
This gives the user a preview of the results even before they finish creating their alert. This is exactly what we were looking for in the previous question.
Are there any limitations?
Yes, there are! The basic alert includes a maximum of 15 keywords, and more specifically: 5 required keywords, 5 optional keywords, 5 excluded keywords.
As far as entity monitoring is concerned, i.e. social networking pages and rating and review sites, the main constraint is the type of offer chosen. This impacts both the volume of entities monitored, and the source. For example, LinkedIn company page monitoring is only available to Company plan customers.
What makes Workspaces by Mention more interesting than competitors alternatives?
That’s a good question! First, I’d say the number of sources we’re connected to. To me, an essential point of social monitoring is to have a significant number of sources and to be able to offer a 360 search to our users. Then there is our ability to offer today’s combined search modes, all on an intuitive and flexible interface thanks to a well-thought-out design.
