LinkedIn is one of the most complex social networks, but also the most solicited by Mention customers, many of them operating in B2B. With Maxime, our Product Manager, let’s look at the ways Mention can now help businesses obtain insights from the social network with 850 million professionals.
Hello Maxime, can you tell us about your job and your squad ?
Hello! I joined Mention in March 2021, so about two years ago. I’m part of the Monitor squad, we have a lead developer and 4 full stack developers, which makes it 6 of us at the moment, including me. We focus on the core business of Mention: data recovery, data processing and the integration of the data into the various alerts of our clients.
What is LinkedIn business page monitoring in one sentence? Who is it targeting ?
We are definitely addressing B2B companies. We particularly target companies wishing to monitor the communications of their subsidiaries, their franchises, or their competitors. In the first case, they can make sure that the subsidiaries are in line with the communication strategy defined by the headquarters, for example. In the case of monitoring competitors, it allows them to compare their communication actions with those of the competition.
In what way will this new feature solve a customer pain point ?
Well, up until now, we were not extracting any information from LinkedIn. We were collecting information for our clients that were publicly available: press, blogs, forums, etc. We were missing the communication channels for professionals only, where we could get different information.
LinkedIn is one of the most complex social networks and the most expected by our users at the same time. Our challenge was to target the information we intended to fetch for our clients while respecting the very specific guidelines of LinkedIn.
How does it work ?
When creating an alert, or even when editing an existing alert, users are invited to list the different LinkedIn company pages for which they want to be informed about. For each of these pages, we will check at regular intervals—several times a day, in fact—if new posts have been published. We will then fetch and display them in their Mention feed. On the detailed view, they will have a link to the post and if they like, they can go see it in the original application. For an overall picture, users can later generate a report by filtering on the LinkedIn source.
Are there any limitations?
For now, we can only fetch the content of the posts of the LinkedIn company pages, i.e. the text, the associated media or polls. However, we can not yet fetch the comments, which is something that may be added later. Moreover, we are only interested in the company pages for the moment, we will see if we can also extend to public groups and open profiles. For obvious reasons, we will never monitor private or secret groups.
What are the other monitoring sources available with Mention ?
Among the social networks, you can monitor any Facebook pro page, Instagram pro and Twitter accounts. You can even monitor Reddit, and we are able to crawl public reddits and subreddits. Additionally, it is also possible to monitor rating/evaluation sites and receive an alert for each new evaluation submitted on one of these sites.
