Did you like to play with Legos as a child? Then you’ll love ReadyForSocial’s because our features are like building blocks for social selling success. Each feature stacks upon another, creating a well-rounded social media automation application that increases your ROI on social selling.

We have already given you insights into AutoPilot, our most popular feature, and explained how we integrated gamification to make social selling fun for your team. Today, let’s talk about social media mentions and how including them in RFS improves your business outreach.

What are mentions?

Let’s first uncover what mentions are. Mentions, or “tags,” are the inclusion of another account’s handle in one of your posts or comments. While hashtags organize your post into a pool of similar topics, mentions directly connect your post to the people or companies referenced. Mentions can be used in both posts and comments and are often noted by the ‘@’ sign before the user’s name, but they can also be just the name in a bold and colored font. 

Whether a mention is in a post or a comment, the purpose is to ensure that someone acknowledges it. In posts, mentions can be used to let a company know about a product review or to shout out a colleague or client for an accomplishment. Usually, the user mentioned is featured in the post, like a photo of the person or a video of the product review. 

In comments, mentions can be used to directly address the post to which it’s connected. The comment can mean a couple of different things depending on who the mention is referring to. If the mention is for the original poster, the comment is something that they want the poster to see. This could be a reply to an article or a post and should always be addressed to the creator of the post. If the mention is to someone else, it’s almost like the commenter is forwarding the post to another person. This might be a friend of the commenter who enjoys the post’s topic or a person who has the product being reviewed.

Why are mentions noteworthy?

As described earlier, mentions are critical for feedback and acknowledgment. People use mentions to make someone aware of something. You can determine what you need to improve and what’s working well by looking at the content around the mention. What are the product reviews saying? What qualities are being rewarded? Posts with mentions let you know about your social reputation, and you can use that insight to plan how you’ll move forward. Responding to what’s being said can also help your social reputation, as your audience sees you as approachable and will engage more. 

In addition, mentions are also an excellent analytic to track. The more posts with mentions, the more widespread your reach is. A mention, while making you aware of a post, also makes the post’s audience aware of you. That mention can bring more traffic to your social media, which leads to more engagement, visibility, and conversion. Depending on how many posts you’re mentioned in, you can estimate the size of your reach.

Meanwhile, giving mentions ensures the intended party sees your post. For example, if you’re congratulating someone on a work accomplishment or asking a question about an article shared on LinkedIn, you’ll want that person to see it. A mention lets you direct your audience to someone or something you want them to engage with and ensure the person you’re mentioning sees that post so they can engage with it, too. On Instagram, user-tagged posts increased the engagement rate by 56%.

However, you can’t just mention a bunch of people and expect a huge uptick in engagement. If you spam mentions on posts, there’s a good chance that you’ll be ignored. Like almost every tactic in social selling, moderation is key. In some cases, less is more. Do you have an event photo to post that includes many people from the same company? It’s a good idea to tag the company instead of every person; the post won’t spam as many people and will also look cleaner on your end as well. 

What is unique about RFS’s ability to include mentions?

Now that you know about what mentions are and how they’re important, let’s talk about how they make RFS unique. RFS is currently the only social selling outlet and content scheduling tool that enables you to include LinkedIn mentions within the platform. This saves you time and effort because you don’t have to log into your LinkedIn account to add mentions to your already shared posts manually.

As stated before, RFS features stack on each other like building blocks, and AutoPilot and mentions work the same way. Using our Own Post feature in RFS, you can add mentions to your scheduled posts into our AutoPilot system. Therefore, if you have special posts about events or shoutouts you want to schedule, they will run with the rest of your posts. In cases where you want your post to be used by the rest of your company on RFS, you also have the option to choose so, but the own post mentions are private to your account otherwise. 

RFS Autopilot is geared to work with your personal mentions, which can be added to an address book that saves them for later use. This way, you can view and organize mentions that work with your profile and are not shared between users of the same company through the RFS system.

In addition, we work with your company to create mentions that can be used on our Autopilot posts. This allows your company to interact with partners and your corporate page. These mentions are shared throughout the RFS system with users of the same company, allowing your business to be spread and seen by multiple audiences and increasing your reach.

Conclusion

Mentions can be used to create engagement, share audiences, and ensure a post’s message gets to whom it needs to. ReadyForSocial has made mentions a key part of our system to ensure that your social selling experience is as smooth sailing as possible. This is one of the many ways we can help you increase your ROI on social selling.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay, Gerd Altmann from Pixabay, and Chen from Pixabay