I’m starting to get a reputation among my colleagues for being a sleuth when it comes to social mentions of Passle. I love taking screenshots of happy customers talking about us, or finding obscure blogs that happen to champion us, and sharing it with them.

Back when I was an academic, and then working as a research editor, I spent countless hours finding the right references, or the right edition of a particular work,... In many ways, tracking mentions of Passle online isn’t too different, and in fact, much more straightforward.

Here are some free ways in which you can track your brand’s performance (substitute ‘Passle’ for your brand’s name):

Twitter search

Simple yet useful:

• Type ‘Passle’ in
• Reassure Twitter that you do mean ‘Passle’ and not ‘hassle’
• (you can bypass these two steps if you have a similarly unique brand name by making it a saved search. Click on ‘more options’ and select ‘Save this search’. It’ll now come up as suggestion when you click Twitter’s search bar).
• Select ‘Live’ rather than ‘Top’, to see all the most recent occurrences of 'Passle'
• In the ‘Select more’ tab you can narrow this search to show (for example) only results from people you follow, or users that are near you.

I use this to see what content from the Passle network is being shared, as well as see Tweets from people who aren’t using our Twitter handle. For example, if someone says ‘I love Passle’ or even just shares a link which includes ‘Passle’ in the address, I’ll be able to see it even if they don’t tag us. Sometimes people are in a rush, or tweeting from their phone and don’t remember people’s Twitter handles (it’s @passle by the way!), so I recommend a search.

If you're proud of what's appearing in this search, why not embed it on your website as social proof? You just need to select that option in 'more options'.

(You can do this, to some extent, with other social media networks too, but Twitter's search engine is, in my opinion, the best).

Google search

Again, this seems pretty obvious, but every so often I search for Passle on Google.

• To limit this to results that aren’t on the Passle network I make sure to type: ‘Passle –passle.net’. The minus sign means that it’ll exclude results from that domain.
• Click on ‘Search tools’ (below the search bar on Google)
• Instead of ‘Any Time’ check ‘Past 24 hours’ or ‘Past Week’  to ensure you see the most recent posts that mention Passle.

Automatic alerts

I know you’re going to tell me to use Google alerts instead, but I find it pretty clunky and slow – it lets me know about posts several days after I’ve found them myself so I tend to stick to manual.

There is no harm in doing both, however, I’ve recently started to experiment with Talkwalker (free) and Social Mentions (free trial). So far, I’m more impressed with Talkwalker which has occasionally shared links I’d missed and in real time too. Social Mentions so far mostly shows me Twitter mentions, but as the tweets they display all feature our handle, they’re mentions I could easily access for free elsewhere. To be continued….