How to Find Your Hidden Social Mentions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Whenever a client asks us to help improve their social media presence, one of the first things we look at is how responsive they are. It's one tactic in a larger audit we do, but it's a big one because it represents the "social" part of social media.
We're not just talking @ mentions and wall posts here; we look at brand mentions, and whether our client's social team is picking those up. If they're not, queuing them into these types of mentions is one of the fastest and easiest ways to improve the amount of engagement on a social account.
You can do this yourself if you know where to look. Here are a few key places to check:
Instagram - Photos of You and geolocated photos
Open up your Instagram account and click to view your profile. Click on the head-and-shoulders icon inside the tag in the middle-right of the page. This is Photos of You—photos that other users have tagged your account in. If you see photos there that you haven't noticed before, and that you haven't commented on or liked, go through and do that.
Next, check out who's geotagged photos at your place of business. To do this, you'll need to have uploaded a photo that's geotagged to your business' location. Click on the geotag, and see who else has posted. Again, make sure to like and comment on all those photos.
Make it a habit to check these spaces regularly, and interact with any new photos you see.
Facebook - Notifications tab
You probably already check for likes and comments on your Facebook posts, but there are a lot of other actions Facebook users can take on your page. The Notifications tab is a great way to check for them. Along with notifications for likes, comments, and shares on posts, you'll see when people post to your wall, mention your page, or check in at your location. For storefront businesses, the check-ins can be particularly high-volume and valuable.
Twitter - Brand name search
We've talked before about how useful Twitter Search is. One of the easiest ways to put it to work for you is to type your brand name into the search field (in quote marks, if your brand is more than one word) and see what comes up. The initial results will show the most-popular tweets about your brand; if you click the Live tab, you can see everything in chronological order (newest on top).
From here, do the same thing you did on Instagram and Facebook—interact with as many tweets as you can. Try out variations of your brand name, too; for example, search "Coca-Cola" as well as "Coke," "Diet Coke," "Coke Zero," #cocacola, #coke, etc.
Got it?
If you haven't already grabbed at this type of low-hanging social media fruit, work on it for a week, and you'll see great results in terms of the number of interactions and impressions your accounts receive.