You’ve probably heard that your business needs to start social listening with a brand mention tool. After all, mentions and conversations in communities are becoming much more valuable.
Google’s landscape is changing, and community conversations are taking priority over brands’ content in search results. Plus, users are increasingly searching for answers – and products – on social and in forums, instead of starting with a traditional Google search. Some are even bypassing Google all together
Here at Referral Rock, we heard – and tried to follow – that advice of starting social listening. But we quickly learned that social listening tools aren’t one-size-fits-all. Here’s what we learned, the pitfalls we ran into, and advice for smaller and niche B2B SaaS businesses.
Setting the stage: Who are we?
Referral Rock is a B2B SaaS that makes it easy for businesses to set up and run referral, affiliate, and ambassador programs. We help companies get more referrals from happy customers – and turn those referrals into new customers – without the pain of building and tracking a referral program on their own. Our system automates referral tracking, promotion, and rewards to maximize sharing.
As far as the type of market we’re in, we’re a “considered purchase,” not an “impulse purchase.” We solve a problem, but it’s not a hair-on-fire problem you see people needing to solve yesterday. And the decisions about whether to buy our product usually take several months, because Referral Rock is a major business purchase with several stakeholders involved.
There’s no single market leader in our industry. And even though we can run several types of programs that generate word of mouth, our SaaS is still very niche. We’re not like an email marketing tool or CRM that nearly every B2B needs. We’re not a HubSpot- or Mailchimp-like case, and we aren’t competing with a HubSpot- or Mailchimp-like behemoth.
What are we listening for?
Like most brands that start social listening, we wanted to monitor conversations with our brand name, as well as competitor names.
But since our business is a smaller, niche B2B SaaS, we figured that the most valuable conversations for our business wouldn’t mention Referral Rock (or any referral SaaS) directly. Rather, they’d indicate strong buyer intent – interest in building a referral program or finding referral software/referral tools.
Examples of the terms we looked for:
- “build a referral program”
- “set up a referral program”
- “referral software”
- “referral tools”
- “referral program software”
- “track referrals”
Where are we listening?
There are three main types of communities a brand can do social listening across: public communities, niche public forums, and private communities.
Public communities include social media, public forums and communities with a wide audience, blogs, and conversations across the wider web.
Niche public forums are public communities divided by interest or question, such as Quora, Stack Exchange, Product Hunt, and subreddits on Reddit.
Private communities include Slack groups, Indie Hackers, Dev.to, and other closed forums that the public can’t access without a login.
We figured that if something wasn’t talked about publicly, it probably isn’t talked about much privately. Still, we planned to start with a public facing tool, and then move to a tool focused more on niche and private settings, to gauge how many conversations were really out there in each type of space.
Researching social listening tools
Given our business type and niche, we figured we’d need a tool that could monitor multiple conversation categories at the same time (both brand name and buyer intent mentions). Ideally, this tool would also let us monitor several similar, but distinct, keywords without us wasting too many keywords from our allotment.
We also considered the platforms each tool serves. As a B2B, the prime conversations about our niche don’t take place on Instagram or TikTok. Instead, we predicted that most of the conversations we’d want to monitor (both with and without brand names) would take place in niche forums and public communities,such as Reddit, X and Facebook.
Based on our research, the best platform match for public communities – and the most cost-effective for monitoring these multiple conversations – was Awario.
And the best platform match for private communities and niche forums was Syften – there aren’t many other tools that match its breadth of monitoring these spaces.
Note: Since we decided to start with a public-facing social listening tool first, and then try one focused on niche forums and private groups later on, we started with Awario, and then used Syften.
| Tool | Price starts at (monthly) | Checks public sites | Checks public social | Checks niche public forums | Checks private sites | Mentions/ month | Keywords |
| BrandMentions | $79 | Websites, blogs, forums, news | Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube | Quora, Reddit | no | 5k | 15 |
| Mentionlytics | $41 | News, blogs, forums, websites | X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube | no | 5K | 3 | |
| Brand24 | $79 | News, blogs, forums | Facebook, Instagram, X | no | 2k | 3 | |
| Mention | $41 | News, blogs, forums | Instagram, X | no | 5k | 2 | |
| Awario | $29 | News, blogs, forums, websites | X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram | no | 30k | 3 topics with unlimited KWs | |
| Buska | $69 | Websites, blogs, Google News | LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest | Reddit, Product Hunt | Indie Hackers | unlimited | 10 |
| Syften | $40 | Forums, blogs, news | X (Twitter) | Reddit, Stack Exchange, Product Hunt, Hacker News, (Quora only on $100 plan) | Slack, Indie Hackers, Steemit, Lobster, Dev.to | ? | 20 |
Execution of the tools
Now that we knew which tools we wanted to use for social listening, how would we use the tools? And how did we plan on responding to relevant mentions?
Our main goal was to find people who could benefit from our software, based on pain points they were facing (or explicitly expressed interest in referral software). We would then share how our solution can help mitigate their pain points, in an organic way, by inserting our name into conversation replies.
We also planned to find our share of voice (how much we are talked about vs. how much other close competitors are talked about).
But with many competitors in the market, and many suited to only some of the use cases we cover, we thought share of voice would be difficult to track.
- Given that we only had three “projects” available through Awario, and chose to focus most on buyer intent keywords, we didn’t apply this idea while using Awario.
- We were able to check share of voice more closely with Syften, but largely using the URLs of our website and competing websites.
- Just using competitors’ names wasn’t helpful; this returned lots of irrelevant mentions, like people sharing their referral codes.
- There also weren’t many conversations as a whole where people in our target audience mentioned any referral software by name.
During our first week with Awario, we found yet another possible opportunity to use brand mentions. The idea was to find non-competing articles focused on marketing tips in a given industry, where referral programs are mentioned as a tip.
We thought maybe we could reach out and see if we could get a backlink. (For instance, if we found an HVAC marketing article where referrals are mentioned, we could suggest that they add a backlink to our HVAC referral program article.) But since we already have another reliable method for sourcing backlinks, this idea was ultimately scrapped.
Traditional social listening tools: Not the best fit for a niche B2B like us
What did we learn after using a social listening tool? Here’s an overview of our findings after using Awario and Syften:
Mention monitoring works better with a wider market
Some larger SaaS businesses with a wide market, like MailChimp, might benefit from monitoring mentions of their brand name, to keep their finger on the pulse of their share of voice. But as we predicted, there weren’t many relevant conversations out there that mentioned our brand name, in any space (public, niche, or private).
Unfortunately, there weren’t many mentions involving buyer intent keywords, either. That’s not Awario’s or Syften’s fault – that’s because of our niche. Referral marketing software has a smaller, more focused market than, say, email marketing. So, relevant conversations aren’t as common.
It’s not talked about much in public, and it isn’t talked about much in niche or private settings, either.
Hard to filter out the irrelevant mentions
There are two main types of referral marketing conversations on the web, each intended for a different audience. The first, the one we’re interested in, is focused on businesses that want to build a referral program. But the second type, and the one we don’t care about, advertises how consumers can join referral programs and make the most money possible (or involves consumers themselves sharing their referral codes).
Even with Awario’s feature that let us exclude irrelevant keywords of our choice, it was still hard to keep those irrelevant conversations from showing up in our feed. As both types of conversations used a similar set of keywords, it didn’t make sense to exclude very many terms. I tried excluding websites instead when it was clear they had the “make money” angle, but with so many sites out there, this felt like playing Whac-A-Mole.
Note: Putting a keyword in quotes means Awario searches for, or excludes, the exact keyword. If you don’t enclose it in quotes, Awario will also search for, or exclude, instances where the words are close to each other and in any order.
When we shifted to trying Syften, the designers of that tool recommended that we focus on monitoring direct mentions of our URL and competitor URLs. They explained that direct backlinks in niche and private communities are the best sign of a relevant mention. We went that route, but still wanted to experiment with buyer intent keywords – would Syften be better at cutting through the noise?
Well… there still weren’t many relevant conversations out there, at least not many that mentioned referral software directly. And although a lot of the noise got cut out with the right filters, there were still several irrelevant conversations to sort through.
If your product or service has wide appeal (for instance, you’re selling an email tool or CRM), you might still do ok with monitoring buyer intent keywords. But we hardly found any true buyer intent as we were constantly sifting through the noise.
Conduct LinkedIn monitoring, with a tool or not
Another thing to keep in mind is that Awario and Syften don’t identify LinkedIn mentions. So, you’ll need to check for mentions right in LinkedIn. The same goes for several other brand mention tools – they either don’t check LinkedIn, or you’ll need to pay more comparatively per month for a tool that does.
We didn’t expect many buyer intent conversations on LinkedIn despite being a B2B SaaS, so we didn’t think excluding LinkedIn would be an issue. But we had some strong buyer intent mentions during this time that we found through LinkedIn itself, including one that mentioned us as an option under consideration. You’re probably better off checking LinkedIn’s own mentions tab, although this only picks up mentions of your brand name. You’ll have to search for buyer intent keywords manually.
Again, none of these problems are Awario’s or Syften’s fault; it comes down to our market position and how niche we are. The problems we had with Awario likely extend to all businesses in our niche, as well as any B2B SaaS with a smaller market size.
Reddit might be your best bet if you’re niche
People aren’t talking about referral software much, but there are still lots of communities who could benefit from our product.
How to find those communities? We might shift our focus to a different type of community monitoring, and go “up the funnel,” as Colin James Belyea recommends. This will involve finding communities with entrepreneurs and marketers who could benefit from running a referral program – or who are already running one, but struggling to manage it on their own.
Sure, there aren’t many relevant, referral-related discussions on Reddit right now.
But there are lots of entrepreneurship and marketing discussions where we could contribute meaningfully.
Rather than waiting for the mention or the referral-related discussion, we can then insert ourselves into the conversation first and get them thinking about referral software.
And why focus on Reddit? Simply because of the sheer volume of those relevant conversations. As Belyea says, “If you’re selling in a high-consideration market, people are looking for others’ opinions before buying. In 2024, those conversations (over 80 million a day!) are happening on Reddit.”
A different type of social listening tool – one focused on finding relevant Reddit audiences first – might help us unearth conversations we should enter. And instead of looking for conversations about referrals, we might look for those about general word of mouth, or about acquiring new customers.
Our next steps
We’ve decided to cease using Awario because there aren’t enough relevant mentions in public communities. Syften’s filtering tools seem more promising, but the hypothesis we had holds true – what isn’t talked about much publicly isn’t talked about much privately. That means our time with Syften probably won’t last long either.
So, what’s next for us? We’ll likely shift our focus to entering Reddit community conversations and dropping our name when we find people who could benefit.
An emerging Reddit search tool called Gummysearch might be a good fit to try next, as it starts with curating relevant audiences and then lets you search for keywords as you wish. But once we’ve found the best subreddits to track, we might be ok with monitoring and searching them regularly on our own.