What monitoring does

What it is for

Most brand monitoring hands you a pile of links and leaves the reading to you, which is why most people stop opening it after a fortnight. The point of this one is that the reading is already done. You open the feed to see what kind of week you are having, not to work out what each post says.

That changes what you can do with it:

• Answer the ones worth answering. A question about your product is worth ten minutes. A passing name-drop is not, and you can tell them apart without opening either.
• Hear about problems early. Complaints and bug reports are their own labels, so you can build an alert for exactly those and ignore the rest.
• Win links from it. Sites that turn up while listening become opportunities in your linkbuilding feed at no extra cost, so a monitoring keyword quietly improves your link discovery too. See Mentions and your links.

How a mention gets to you

1. You add a keyword. A name you want to hear about: your brand, a product, a rival, a misspelling people actually type. See Choosing what to listen for.
2. Serpfeed checks for it. Which platforms, and how often, depends on your plan. See Where mentions come from.
3. Every mention is read on arrival and given a label and a sentiment before you ever see it. See Labels and sentiment.
4. The ones you asked to hear about reach you. Alert rules decide which combinations are worth an email, and a loud day arrives as one message rather than two hundred.
5. You reply, or you dismiss. Serpfeed can draft the reply in your voice; posting it is always yours. See Working your mentions.

What it costs

Mentions do not cost credits. Every plan includes a number of mentions a month, and monitoring simply stops fetching once you reach it, so there is no way to run up a bill by listening for something popular. The allowances are in Where mentions come from.

The one thing that does use credits is asking Serpfeed to draft a reply for you, at 2 credits a draft. Writing your own is free.