Mention is a neat little service that will track any mentions of you, your brand, or your favorite topics across the internet, including Tweets, Facebook mentions, blog posts, etc. The free plan provides 1000 mentions a month, and the results might surprise or entertain you.
Who doesn’t want to know when others are talking about them? Someone famous once said that the sweetest sound to any human is their own name.If you have a website or a business, you might be able to get a good idea of the general internet buzz and/or feeling about it by using mention to track instances where people are talking about it.
You may also use it to monitor mentions of important news items or anything else that might interest you. Since the alerts are based on criteria you enter, the sky’s the limit on what you can search for mentions on.
How it works: Mention is provided as a Windows, Mac, and Linux download, as well as a Chrome or web app. Once you logged in, you can setup ‘searches’ consisting of one or multiple keywords, and choose among sources to monitor: “Web, Facebook, Twitter, News, Blogs, Videos, Forums, and Images” (see screenshot to the right).
The layout of the program is pretty simple and self-explanatory, and each field will give a brief description in tooltips. You can create more than one search, if you so desire, but I would recommend just one to start with so you can get a feel for what it can do. Try setting up a search with your name and see where it takes you, first. Then, when you start looking at more options and searches, you’ll have a good idea of what can be accomplished. As you can imagine, each social account or other source you add could increase your search results, but even without them you’re still bound to get some pretty robust listings.
The information that comes back on any given search or alert is pretty extensive. While I wouldn’t be willing to say this program will find every single place on the web that mentions you or your search subject, I would say it’s a fair bet it will turn up something, at the very least, for even the most diverse and unexpected subjects. I tried making some pretty wild and weird searches just to test the limits of the program and was not disappointed with the results. It is fairly easy to setup and use and can provide some valuable information with a high entertainment value.
The free version of mention is limited to logging 1000 mentions per month; which, if you are wondering, is a lot. We’ve been using Mention to monitor the term ‘Freewaregenius’ and for an Alexa 35000 ranked site like this one that gets quite a few links and mentions, the 1000 free mentions limit has been more than adequate.
Until next time, my friends.
Check out Mention for Windows and as a Chrome app here
