The Battle of Usability: SentiOne vs. Mention

In modern digital marketing, getting ahead is often mistaken as acquiring bigger and better tools than the rest of the competition.

To keep your company from haphazardly bleeding cash for features you don’t need, you must pick the platforms that perfectly suit the unique needs of your brand.

When it comes to social media listening, remember that you only have three key goals: keep up with the latest trends in your niche, connect with potential leads, and correct any misinformation regarding your brand.

This means tuning in to all conversations across cyberspace — be it in social networks, online forums, and blog comment sections.

A social media listening and monitoring tool, like SentiOne and Mention, can help you with this tasks. And to help you decide which platform is perfect for your brand, here is a closer look on each one’s features.

SentiOne

SentiOne is a fast and straightforward online monitoring tool that runs on homegrown technology.

Upon logging in for the first time, users are offered a quick tutorial to jump-start their productivity and familiarity with the interface. However, even by skipping ahead, beginners should still be able to learn their way around fairly easily — thanks to the unified side menu.

To get started, you need to create a social monitoring project by clicking the “Create” button, which is found on the upper-right corner in the “Projects” tab.

SentiOne will then let you choose between three project formats that can speed up the initial setup process. Here is a closer look at each option:

Brand
Lets you monitor for mentions of your brand or product name. This can also be used if you want to track competitors.

Social Profiles

Tracks the activities of a specific social media profile — be it on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter.

Other
Scans everywhere else for mentions of any keyword or phrase.

After choosing from one of the options, you’ll be taken to a page where you can specify the keywords you’d like to include or exclude in your project.

For example, if you selected the “Brand” option, you’ll see the following page:

Another way to create projects with SentiOne is through the Advanced Project Configurator. This can be accessed by clicking the “Advanced Project Configurator” in the project creation start page.

This will give you complete control of your project’s monitoring rules and options. You can track your brand’s Facebook fan page, monitor for keyword mentions in a specific domain, check for new content written by an author, and so on.

For example, if you want to monitor for mentions of “content marketing” while excluding posts from competitors like Neil Patel, here’s what your project settings would look like:

Take note that the “Include” and “Exclude” tags above the keyword fields are actually dropdown menus. You can freely switch between two modes by clicking them.

Once you click “Save”, you’ll be taken straight to the “Dashboards” page. Here, you can monitor various analytics data such as the total volume of mentions over time, top sources, gender distribution, and user sentiment breakdown.

It’s worth noting that each data widget can be modified to present the exact visualization you need. For example, if you want the “Sentiment” chart to exclude mentions from female users, click “Edit settings” and deselect the “Female” button.

To pull in fresh data, you can navigate to the “Mentions” tab to browse for new posts in real time. Simply select the project you want to use from the dropdown menu and use the filters to refine the results.

Feel free to adjust the filters as you see fit. Just don’t forget to click “Update results” to refresh the page whenever you change any setting.

Lastly, SentiOne allows you to generate reports as well as set alerts to keep you updated 24/7. This allows you to react quickly to mentions — maximizing opportunities to engage potential leads, prevent misinformation, and stay ahead of the information curve in your niche.

Mention

Mention is another social media listening tool that values the usability factor. After signing in, you are immediately presented with the alert creation wizard where you can commence tracking in full swing.

Just like SentiOne, Mention presents you with three options, namely:

My Company or Product

Similar to SentiOne’s “Brand” tracking option, this enables you to monitor for mentions of your brand or product.

A Competitor

Allows you to track the online presence of competitors.

Anything Else

Just like the “Other” tracking option in SentiOne, this third option allows you to monitor for any keyword — everywhere else on the web.

To match SentiOne’s Advanced Project Configurator, Mention offers “Boolean queries”. Although it provides you with unlimited keywords, queries, and results, it’s not exactly the most intuitive or beginner-friendly option.

On the flip side, Mention’s built-in tracking for the basic options are reasonably comprehensive. It allows you to include and exclude keywords through the setup page.

You can also specify “Priority Pages”, which will be scanned for mentions first. Some of the practical use cases for this is for tracking your competitor’s website, monitoring your social media channels, and checking for new comments in specific domains.

Finally, you can modify your “Sources and Languages” through an intuitive selection page. All you need to do is to check the content sources and languages and click “View Results” to start monitoring.

Once you complete the setup, you are taken to an interface that resembles an email client. This is where you can start monitoring, managing, and engaging brand mentions from all the sources you specified earlier.

You can also generate reports as well as review insights through the main menu found on the top bar. To be fair, the visualization types available in Mention are quite extensive, but rather than aggregating all data in a single page, you have to navigate to view each of them individually.

Verdict

Both SentiOne and Mention can provide you with all-around monitoring. However, SentiOne’s Advanced Project Configurator is the deciding factor as far as usability goes.

Although Mention’s Boolean queries feature allows you to track an unlimited number of keywords at a time, it has a much steeper learning curve than SentiOne’s in-page configuration page. Analytics and report generation are also made far simpler.

What’s next?

Which platform did you think won our comparison? Take the time to share your ideas in the comments section below. Cheers!