Social media can be a goldmine for marketing insights, but you’ll have to work to dig some of them out. Straightforward forms of engagement, like direct mentions, are easy to track, but you can also learn a lot from indirect mentions: the discourse hidden in untagged posts, comments, and discussion threads.
With 54% of consumers using social media to research brands and products, these platforms present countless opportunities to learn what your target audience wants and their thinking if you know how to listen to them.
To get a complete picture of your customer’s desires and perceptions, you need to track both direct and indirect mentions and differentiate between them—candid conversations reveal different things than ones directed at the brand itself. When you can analyze both in context, a more complete picture of customer sentiment emerges.
What are direct mentions?
Any time a user posts, comments, or talks about your brand or products on social media that counts as a mention—but mentions come in varying degrees of directness. A direct mention is a content that tags your brand’s social media account or alerts you that it was posted.
Examples of direct mentions would include a post on X complaining about a product issue that includes your brand’s @username or a Facebook comment on your brand page thanking you for resolving a thorny customer service issue. Direct mentions are a key metric you should track to measure engagement alongside impressions, clicks, views, or time spent reading your post.
What are indirect mentions?
Untagged discussions about your brand are considered indirect mentions, and finding them can take effort. The easiest ones to identify are posts and comments referencing your brand by name (without tagging you in the post). Because you’re not tagged, you wouldn’t get a notification, but you could find all these posts with a basic search query. The more elusive indirect mentions may be identifiable by references to your products, marketing slogans, or context-dependent language.
Indirect mentions can include a dynamic video review of your product on TikTok, a discussion of your customer service in a LinkedIn thread that avoids calling your brand out by name, or a Reddit post by a user trying to locate your product.
Direct mentions vs indirect mentions: Which holds more power?
Direct mentions are part of your brand’s owned marketing activities. These are the posts and comments customers want your brand to notice. As such, they should be considered important communications and receive a timely response per a broader communications strategy.
Although customers often deliver positive feedback through direct mentions, they commonly use them to ask questions and escalate customer service issues. For example, your customer may tag you because they want to register for your webinar, have a product query, or simply share their experience.
Social media is an inviting and accessible channel for feedback, and smart brands solicit open communication or at least make it easy for customers to @ them. If you can address an issue in full public view (aka, it’s not a legal matter or anything you wouldn’t want to share your company views on), consider doing so. This way, you can showcase your excellent customer service and problem-solving skills to the world, earning your brand’s trust.
Indirect mentions, on the other hand, are part of your brand’s share of voice and earned marketing activities. Their impact on social ROI can be challenging to attribute, but customer-to-customer conversations’ effect on brand sentiment and lead generation should not be discounted. These discussions can also provide your earliest warnings about developing crises, negative stories, and other threats to your brand reputation.
With the rise of organic conversations on platforms like LinkedIn and X, particularly in niche B2B communities, indirect mentions have increased in frequency and importance: 48% of consumers discover brands through vlogs, comments, recommendations, forums, and other social channels where indirect mentions predominate. These conversations offer genuine, unfiltered insights into how customers perceive your brand and experience the products and services you provide.
The challenges of tracking Indirect mentions and how to overcome them
The main difficulty with indirect mentions is that they don’t announce themselves—you have to put some work into finding them. You can manually search for your brand name and related keywords on social media platforms and major search engines. The drawbacks of this approach are apparent: it’s laborious and time-consuming, and you won’t be able to achieve real-time visibility into all the platforms that matter.
Google Alerts can take some of the work off your plate, but Google can’t see every conversation within the comment sections and private groups inside the walled gardens of social media. A better solution can be found in social listening tools, which monitor and analyze online conversations across public platforms and private social media spaces.
However, even these can miss important mentions due to the use of slang, variant brand and product names, and abbreviations. The best approach is to research your listening tool options and choose solutions like Oktopost that use automated, AI-powered detection features to catch as many relevant conversations as possible.
How to boost the ROI of direct and indirect mentions
Tracking your direct and indirect mentions is a crucial part of any social media marketing strategy, and both types can have a direct effect on your ROI—both in terms of what the mentions signify about the effectiveness of your campaign and how the tone and content of those mentions might move customer sentiment in a positive direction.
Here are a few things you can do to increase the ROI associated with your mentions actively:
- Quantify the value of direct and indirect mentions using metrics like click-through rate, engagement, and lead generation. It is essential to use metrics that align with the goals of your active marketing campaigns.
- Create keyword alerts for indirect mentions. Think creatively about abbreviations, common misspellings, slang, catchphrases, and other outside-the-box search terms that might help you find conversations about your brand that would otherwise fly under the radar.
- Set a specific timeframe for responding to direct mentions. While it’s best to reply promptly to every customer, responding to complaints and product issues carries more urgency than acknowledging shout-outs. Ensure you have a system that prevents unanswered queries from falling through the cracks. Equally, have clear guidelines on dealing with specific questions or complaints, and include these in your social media governance plan.
- Compare metrics accurately and effectively with Oktopost’s analytics and reporting tools. Build custom reports around your key performance metrics and plan your next steps with the help of insights generated through an AI-driven analytics engine.
- Choose social media tools that integrate with your CRM and facilitate rule-based follow-ups. Automation is critical to a sustainable, scalable social media strategy. Utilize tools that integrate with your existing sales channels, systems, and datasets to generate personalized responses without ever leaving anyone waiting for an answer. You can also pull social data into your CRM to inform your marketing efforts and build better buyer personas.
Did we mention you should track mentions?
Tracking your mentions isn’t just about vanity metrics. Observing and analyzing these interactions can help you better understand your target audience and show you how to build a stronger brand presence.
Capturing all of your indirect mentions in real time can be challenging. Still, solutions like Oktopost allow B2B marketers to go beyond surface-level monitoring and leverage the full spectrum of social media insights to drive engagement and conversion. Whether you’re providing an immediate response to direct tags or uncovering candid conversations hidden from ordinary view, Oktopost ensures you’re always in the loop and ready to act. Book a demo today to try out Oktopost’s advanced social media management features firsthand.
