How to Check Your Real-Time Social Media Mentions for Free

Updated 12/19 to add definition of “passion” percentage.

I have been using Social Mention for a few months now and I just realized tonight that they offer an alert that I can receive in my e-mail. The website is called Social Mention and it is a real-time search engine. You use it to track your personal brand and see where you are mentioned. Now, I can get these social mentions daily in my email box or in my RSS reader all for free.

This is what you see on the home page. Just put the term you want to search into field (A) and choose what you want to search (blog, videos, bookmarks, all, etc) in (B). The topics I always search

This is what I see when I search “scrappinmichele”. There is so much really useful information. You can click on the links above the search box and narrow your results to videos, blogs, bookmarks, etc from this page too.

AND you can receive this in several other ways. This is what is shown in the far right of the results page. You can view the results in your RSS Feed, an Email Alert or download a CSV/Excel File in several different formats.

The different searches really make this a unique tool in my eyes. You can search for an events in a certain locations. I searched for social media events in the Washington DC area in this example:

Or search networks about a certain topic. Here I searched for digital scrapbooking networks.

The search options are endless, only limited by your imagination. If you click on the “or select social media sources” link shown by the arrow, it gives you a large list of different sources and you can choose which ones you would like to search. And you also get the top trend of the moment shown underneath.

And if that isn’t enough (and did I mention this is all free), you can add a real-time tracking widget to your blog/website, just like this one:

Cydi off Wetfish Designs asked me a very good question about the “passion” rating and I didn’t have the correct answer so I set out to find it.

According to the Social Mention website FAQs,

Passion is a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly.

This is a fantastic tool to watch your personal brand and keep track of where you are being mentioned in the social media world and it’s all FREE! Go try it out and let me know what you think.

What tools do you use to track your personal brand?