A Simple Way to Track Your Social Fundraiser Mentions

Your strategy around social fundraising campaigns needs to have an easy way to track mentions about the campaign. These would include blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Tweets, Facebook updates, and forum posts.

Tracking mentions accurately allows your organization to determine where to focus resources and where to cut bait. But for many organizations, tracking presents obstacles:

  • Trapping unrelated mentions – If your campaign is about ending child abuse, you might not care about local crime reports mentioning child abuse.
  • Trapping too many many mentions – If your campaign is about clean water, you’d have to weed through all of the health bloggers, cooking bloggers, swimming bloggers, boating bloggers… you get the idea.
  • Capturing mentions on multiple platforms – It might be easy to track blog mentions with Google Blog Search or Twitter’s advanced search, but what about mentions on Facebook and in online forums.

The third obstacle can be easily overcome with Social Mention – a powerful social search engine that tracks mentions on virtually every website.

But even with access to mentions on every website, how can you make sure that your search results are ONLY related to your campaign?

Keyword strategy should include a way to monitor

The easiest way to solve many of the problems mentioned (pun intended) above is to create a unique keyword or phrase that participants can use during your campaign.

For example, Epic Change knows exactly who mentions their cause during Tweetsgiving by encouraging participants to use terms like “Tweetsgiving” and “EpicThanks”. Another example is HopeLab who recently launched a campaign with these clear instructions on their Facebook Page:

How has your org used unique keywords to track mentions?