The end of the year usually makes us a little nostalgic and retrospective. It doesn't make sense to remember things that have happened in the world this past year. But it makes a lot of sense to tell you that BrandMentions ends the year as it started it: with many updates & improvements.
For the past year, BrandMentions has got updated almost monthly.
We have released no fewer than 20 updates in 2020.
And we saved the best for last. Today, we are super proud to give you details about some big improvements that imply a high volume of work, thinking and overthinking, consulting, and nerves. Here's what's brand new with BrandMentions:
- Improved Keyword Tracking
- Better Generic Brand Names Monitoring
- Multiple Language & Countries in One Project
- New Mention Processing Engine
- Improved Twitter Location
- Improved & Simplified Project Setup
- Automatic Spam Exclusion
Improved Keyword Tracking
Any brand monitoring process starts with the ability to accurately track your business-related keywords. It's highly important for any brand to be aware of everything that is being said about them online. But to do so, you need to have the right means to track your keywords. And this translates into a flexible and personalized keyword tracking settings.
We've updated the keyword tracking settings section big time.
We've added more flexibility and the possibility to track even better all types of brands and businesses.
Just like before, you can track whatever interests you most: your brand name and most used variations of it, hashtags, your social accounts handles, topics for industry analysis, etc.
The novelty now is that for each tracked keyword, you have the possibility of performing monitoring as:
- exact match (we will track the keyword(s) exactly the way you added it/them)
- broad match (we will track your keyword(s), including synonyms, misspellings, and many other related variations, including mentions that don’t contain the exact keyword terms; this feature works great for topics tracking)
- case sensitive (we will track the keyword just the way you added it, keeping count of capital and lowercase letters)
From what we know, we are the only web and social listening tool distinguishing between "exact match" and "broad match" monitoring. These new features bring great results for:
- Generic brand names monitoring
- Industry topics data
- Products or keywords with a very particular spelling/orthography
Contain and Exclude keywords are now at a new level.
You have the possibility of fine-tuning your analysis with the help of one of the features below:
- Mentions must contain any of these words
- Exclude mentions that contain any of these words
We know, this has been possible before as well. What is changed now is the level of personalization these two features have known. You can combine them as you wish (similar to the operators "and", "or") and tweak your keywords monitoring process close to perfection.
You can add or exclude keywords:
- as an exact match or case sensitive;
- related to a specific keyword or to all of the monitored ones;
- found anywhere in the context of the mention or within its proximity.
It's sometimes difficult to express in words how big of an improvement some updates are. It's the case with this one as well. So, that's why we are asking you to test out the new improvements ASAP and see it for yourself.
Better Generic Brand Names Monitoring
We know how much of a struggle it is to monitor generic brands. For example, telecommunications corporation Orange, or the technology company Apple. Our own brand is made up of a generic name: Brand Mentions (also referred to as BrandMentions or brand mentions or even BM).
Therefore, we know how difficult it is for generic brands to be monitored as we're facing this issue ourselves. How is this current improvement solving this issue? Check out below!
You can now track case sensitive keywords.
Meaning that when performing the tracking, we keep count of the upper and lower case. In our case, we can add Brand Mentions as a case sensitive tracked keyword. Chances are that people would mention our brand, and not the generic words, with a capital letter. This way, we'll get all the mentions for what is most likely our brand, Brand Mentions, and not the common noun, brand mentions.
You can track even 2 character keywords.
Some people refer to our brand as BM, the initials from BrandMentions. And we know that there are many brands there made up of two or three letters that found it hard to monitor their brands. Not anymore, as you can combine the possibility of tracking brand names under three letters with the case sensitive one, and you've got yourself an accurate brand tracking.
Multiple Language & Countries in One Project
Hope you know by now that we do listen to your feedback. You can check our feedback page and you'll see that we take into account everything that is suggested there, we prioritize everything and start working on it.
Most of the improvements that we're presenting here are inspired by our users' suggestions.
And one of these features is the ability to run multi language & countries projects. What does it mean exactly? Let's say that you have an international brand, but you and your team are working on the brand management of that project in Europe, Nordic countries only. You don't want to get data on all mentions from all over the world and you don't want to set separate projects for each country either.
You can now set projects that will track mentions for a specific set of countries and languages.
Or maybe you want to track all countries but exclude some specific ones. Or you want to get mentions in all languages except a few ones. BrandMentions supports almost all countries, territories and languages that exist. Therefore, when you add there all languages and countries, stay assured as we're actually looking for your mentions literally EVERYWHERE.
New Mention Processing Engine
This current update brings a lot of positive improvements, that's for sure. More features, a new project setting interface and many other items that bring lots of added value to the tool. Yet, what it also brings are improvements that you are not going to see straightforward, but for sure, you are going to notice them. And we are talking here about the backend upgrades, especially the data processing improvements.
You'll get more mentions, faster and better.
I know that this sounds a bit abstract, data improvement. So, what does that exactly mean?
- faster project creations
- more mentions data
- more precise and qualitative insights
- more frequent data crawling
Every time we're planning to make an update, we analyze it a lot before, trying to understand the impact it will have on the user. How will their usability of the app be improved, how will they be reporting to their team, how will the day-to-day mention managing activities will be improved. And we know that the updates that are focused on backend data are often overlooked and not appreciated as they should. And while we know that developing new features is extremely important, so is making the tool processing data the best possible.
Improved Twitter Location
One of the points we heard a lot from our clients is their need to accurately track their mention location, especially on Twitter. We already have geolocation available for all web and social platforms. Yet, we knew that there was room for improvement, especially when it comes to Twitter.
Things are more complicated than they seem when it comes to accurately identifying a user's location: a person can be from France, working in Canada and posting from United States. It's sometimes a challenge to accurately identify a Twitter user's location. Yet, we invested lots of efforts in this issue particularly.
You can now get the location for the mentions found on Twitter as well.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can play around with a few filters and you are one step closer to the exact set of mentions you want to visualize, manage, analyze, or report.
Improved & Simplified Project Setup
The look and feel of the app got improved. And you will see this especially in two sections:
- on the project settings area
- new project creations
Beside adding brand new features, we've also changed the look and feel of the app.
We've improved the design where it was the case, we eliminated unnecessary steps and items, we made some features more accessible while we put the-not-so-used ones in a secondary plan.
Project creation is now an even easier three-steps process, and, why not admit it, it looks better and happier :).
Automatic Spam Exclusion
The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once said that the internet is 95 percent porn and spam. Of course, this is probably a hyperbole, yet, it does have a grain of truth.
There is a lot of noise in the world wide web, and it's very important to sort the wheat from the chaff.
We've improved our overall mentions curation algorithms and procedures, and therefore, way less unrelated and spam mentions will be reported.
Here, at BrandMentions we are a handful of people, probably not very different than other developers, programmers, marketers. But we do have something we take pride in and I believe this is what sets us apart from other similar teams: In everything we do, be it lines of code or tooltips, we always but always think about the end user. Most of our product meetings are not about tasks and deadlines but about users: what did they need in the tool, what can be done, how will this or that help and so on.
At the end of the day, when we leave aside tasks, apps or roadmaps, people are the ones that matter.
And this is what defines us best: a handful of enthusiastic people working the best they can to help other people.
