Social Media Searching

Social media search is a great way to see what is being said about your topic in real time. Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches blogs, social media mentions, images, comments and news articles. It also ranks the “sentiment” of the mentions and how often a topic is being discussed. It is an excellent tool to gauge public interest in your topic. The search interface is not complicated, so I simply searched “cybersecurity” and browsed the various tweets, blogs and mentions that were pulled for the topic.

What I Learned

I honestly cannot say that I learned much about my topic from this search. While the results were interesting, especially the information about the “sentiment” of the public towards the topic of cybersecurity, I did not see any hard facts about cybersecurity that stuck out to me. When we consider one of the earlier articles that I read on the subject of social media research however, the worth of such a tool becomes more clear. A researcher might be able to use this tool to determine how often a corporate entity is mentioned or how much information is being divulged about a company through social media.

The most helpful thing I learned about searching in this database is to make sure of the "Sort By" and "Results" drop down menus at the top of your list of results. If you're looking for up to the minute updates, the "Results" menu will give you updates only from the last couple of hours to days, which can be useful if you are researching a fast changing topic.

Reflections

Social Mention is a quick way to get an idea of what is going on with your topic right that minute. For more popular topics, this tool may be more useful. For example, if you wanted to know how the public perceives a certain public figure, you would be able to see Social Mention’s take on their opinion about the piece. I was especially curious about the “passion” element that was measured, which purported to show how likely a person talking about the topic will talk about the subject again.