Understanding the terminology used in Mentionlytics will help you set up your monitoring correctly, interpret your data, and get more value from your reports and insights.
This glossary covers the most important terms you’ll encounter while using the platform.
Term | What does it mean? | How does it work? & Why is it useful? | Example |
Mention | A mention is an individual piece of content collected by Mentionlytics through your monitored keywords or social profiles. | Mentions are the foundation of your monitoring data. They can include posts, articles, comments, and other supported online content. Mentionlytics analyzes these results to provide sentiment, engagement, trends, and other insights. | If you monitor “CompanyX” and someone posts “I love CompanyX” on X, that post is collected as a mention. |
Keyword | A keyword is a word, phrase, brand name, product, hashtag, competitor, or other term you want Mentionlytics to monitor. | Keywords tell Mentionlytics what to look for. Your keyword setup determines which conversations are collected, so choosing relevant keywords is essential for accurate monitoring. | A company could monitor “CompanyX,” “ProductY,” and #CompanyX. |
Sentiment Analysis | Sentiment Analysis identifies the emotional tone expressed within a mention towards your keyword and generally categorizes it as positive, negative, or neutral. | It allows you to understand audience perception without reading every mention. You can use it to identify negative feedback, positive reactions, and changes in public opinion over time. |
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Source | A source is the online platform or type of channel from which a mention was collected. | Sources help you understand where conversations are happening and allow you to analyze or filter your data by channel. | X, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, news websites, blogs, or forums. |
Dashboard | A dashboard provides a visual overview of your monitoring data using charts, metrics, and other visualizations. | Instead of reviewing mentions one by one, dashboards help you quickly understand the bigger picture, including mention volume, sentiment, engagement, and trends. | A dashboard showing your brand's mentions and sentiment distribution during the last 30 days. |
Alert / Notification | An alert or notification keeps you updated about newly collected mentions based on your configured monitoring conditions. | Notifications help you stay informed without constantly checking Mentionlytics. They're particularly useful for reputation management, important campaigns, and negative feedback. | Receiving an email notification about newly detected negative mentions of your brand. |
Analytics | Analytics refers to the metrics and insights generated from your monitoring data. | Analytics turn individual mentions into meaningful information, helping you identify patterns, changes, trends, and performance over time. | Discovering that positive brand mentions increased by 20% during a campaign. |
Engagement | Engagement represents the interactions generated by social media content, such as likes, comments, shares, and reposts, depending on the platform. | It helps you understand which mentions and pieces of content are generating the strongest audience response. | A post with 1,000 likes, 100 comments, and 50 shares has significantly more engagement than a post with five likes. |
Influencer | An influencer is an author, creator, expert, journalist, or other profile that may have significant influence over an audience or online conversation. | Identifying influential creators helps you understand who is driving or amplifying conversations around your brand, competitors, or industry. | A popular industry expert posting about your product. |
Share of Voice | Share of Voice measures how much of the monitored conversation belongs to your brand compared to competitors or other monitored topics. | It helps you measure your brand's visibility within a competitive landscape and understand whether your presence is growing or declining. | If your brand receives 3,000 of 10,000 total monitored mentions, your Share of Voice is 30%. |
Tagging | Tagging allows you to assign custom labels to mentions and organize them into categories. | Tags make it easier to separate different types of conversations and analyze them individually later. | Tagging mentions as Customer Complaint, Feature Request, PR Coverage, or Campaign A. |
Top Keywords | Top Keywords highlight prominent words and phrases appearing within the conversations you're analyzing. | They help you quickly understand what people are talking about and identify recurring or emerging topics within a large volume of mentions. | After a product launch, the product name or campaign slogan may appear among your Top Keywords. |
User-Generated Content (UGC) | UGC is content created by customers or other users rather than directly by the brand. | Monitoring UGC helps brands discover authentic customer experiences, recommendations, reviews, and content featuring their products. | A customer posting an Instagram photo featuring your product. |
Web Crawling | Web crawling is part of the process used to discover publicly available online content containing monitored keywords. | It enables Mentionlytics to identify relevant brand or keyword mentions across supported web sources beyond social media. | Discovering your company name within an online news article or blog post. |
Report | A report organizes your monitoring data, metrics, and insights into a format that can be reviewed or shared. | Reports make it easier to communicate monitoring results to colleagues, clients, management, or other stakeholders. | A monthly report showing mention volume, sentiment, engagement, and reach. |
Mention Tracker | A Mention Tracker groups related keywords and social profiles into an organized monitoring project. | Trackers help you separate monitoring according to brands, campaigns, competitors, clients, or other use cases. | A tracker called “Brand Monitoring” containing your brand keywords and official social profiles. |
Historical Data | Historical Data refers to eligible mentions retrieved from a period before your current monitoring process began. | Mentionlytics normally collects results from the time monitoring starts. Historical Data can be used when you need to analyze an earlier campaign, event, crisis, or period. Availability depends on the source and requested data. | Retrieving mentions from a campaign that took place three months before you created your tracker. |
Advanced Queries / Boolean Search | Boolean Search allows you to create more precise monitoring queries by combining terms and conditions using operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. | It gives you greater control over your monitoring and can help remove irrelevant results or capture different variations of a topic. | ("CompanyX" OR "ProductX") AND launch NOT jobs |
API | An API allows supported external applications to communicate with Mentionlytics and retrieve platform data programmatically. | Organizations can use the API to incorporate Mentionlytics data into their own systems, workflows, or dashboards. | Displaying Mentionlytics data inside an organization's internal BI dashboard. |
Filters Bar | The Filters Bar allows you to narrow down the mentions and data currently displayed according to specific criteria. | Filters help you focus your analysis without changing your original monitoring setup. You can narrow results based on date, source, sentiment, keyword, and other available criteria. | Filtering your dashboard to display only negative X mentions from the last 30 days. |
Social Listening | Social Listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing online conversations around brands, products, competitors, industries, campaigns, or other topics. | It goes beyond simply collecting mentions by helping organizations understand opinions, trends, customer needs, reputation, and opportunities. | Monitoring conversations around a new product launch to understand customer reactions. |
Brand Monitoring | Brand Monitoring specifically focuses on tracking conversations and online mentions related to your brand. | It helps you understand public perception, discover customer feedback, identify reputation issues, and find positive conversations about your organization. | Monitoring your company name to quickly identify customer complaints and positive reviews. |
Social Media Analytics | Social Media Analytics is the analysis of social media data and performance metrics. | It helps you evaluate how content performs and understand audience interaction through metrics such as engagement, reach, and impressions. | Comparing engagement across your social posts to identify your best-performing content. |
Impressions | Impressions generally represent the total number of times content has been displayed. | Unlike reach, impressions don't necessarily represent unique people. One person may generate multiple impressions by seeing the same content several times. | A post displayed 10,000 times generates approximately 10,000 impressions, depending on the platform's metric definition. |
Engagement Rate | Engagement Rate measures interaction with content relative to another performance metric, commonly reach or impressions. | It helps compare content performance more fairly than looking only at total likes or comments. The exact calculation can vary depending on the platform and context. | 150 engagements ÷ 1,000 reach × 100 = 15% engagement rate. |
Reach | Reach generally represents the number of unique users who have seen or potentially been exposed to content. | Reach helps estimate the size of the audience exposed to your content, while impressions measure the total number of displays. | If 5,000 different users see a post, its reach is approximately 5,000. |
Conversion Rate | Conversion Rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action after interacting with content or a campaign. | It helps evaluate whether marketing activity leads to meaningful business actions such as purchases, registrations, or downloads. | If 10 of 100 users make a purchase, the conversion rate is 10%. |
Sentiment Score | Sentiment Score provides a numerical representation of the overall sentiment within a group of mentions. | It helps you evaluate the general direction of the conversation and compare sentiment between different periods, brands, or topics. | A stronger positive score indicates that positive conversation outweighs negative conversation. |
Influencer Marketing | Influencer Marketing involves collaborating with influential creators or profiles to promote a brand, product, or campaign. | It allows brands to reach established audiences through people who already have influence within a particular community or market. | Working with an Instagram creator to promote a new product launch. |
Earned Media | Earned Media is exposure your brand receives organically from third parties rather than through content you publish or pay to promote. | It can help indicate organic awareness and public interest because the exposure comes from customers, journalists, creators, or other independent sources. | A news publication independently reviewing your new product. |
Owned Media | Owned Media consists of channels and content that your organization controls. | These are the spaces where your brand controls what is published and can directly manage its communication with audiences. | Your website, company blog, or official Facebook page. |
Paid Media | Paid Media is content or exposure distributed through paid advertising. | Brands use paid media to increase visibility, reach specific audiences, or promote particular campaigns and content. | Running a sponsored Facebook campaign to promote a product launch. |
AI Mention Clustering | AI Mention Clustering automatically groups mentions discussing the same or closely related topics, even when users describe them differently. | Instead of manually reviewing hundreds of similar mentions, you can quickly identify the major conversations within your data. This saves time and makes large volumes of mentions easier to analyze. | 200 differently worded posts discussing your new product launch may be grouped into the same topic cluster. |
Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) | SIA is an AI-powered Mentionlytics feature that analyzes your monitoring data to uncover patterns and surface actionable insights. | It helps you move beyond looking at individual metrics by identifying noteworthy changes, patterns, authors, or opportunities within your data that may deserve attention. | SIA may identify that your Facebook page receives higher engagement on a particular day or highlight an author generating significant negative conversation around your brand. |
The above-mentioned concepts are connected.
Keywords tell Mentionlytics what to monitor, the results collected become Mentions, and Sources tell you where those mentions originated.
You can then use Filters and Tags to organize the results, Analytics and Dashboards to understand them, and metrics such as Sentiment, Engagement, Reach, and Share of Voice to evaluate what the conversations mean.
Features such as AI Mention Clustering and SIA take this a step further by helping you identify patterns and insights within large amounts of monitoring data without having to analyze every mention manually.