Your Brand Mentions Are Down. That’s Not Always Good News

[00:00:00] Why fewer mentions can be bad news

Brooke Sellas: The brands treating mention volume as a vanity metric are the same ones who will be confused in six months about why their reach completely cratered.

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Brooke Sellas: Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Social Media CX Podcast. I’m your host, Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, author of Conversations That Connect, and today I want to challenge something a lot of teams quietly celebrate, which is a drop in brand mentions. Hmm.

If your mentions are down this quarter on social media and someone on your team is calling that a win, I wanna change your mind over the next few minutes.

Here’s the story I hear on repeat: a brand’s mentions on social media, those people, like, tagging you on social, mentioning you on social, dips. So we think nobody’s escalating complaints. The inbox feels calmer. Someone in a leadership meeting might say, “Hey, see? Things are going well. People aren’t talking about us as much because there’s nothing to talk about.”

And that sounds and feels really reasonable. But it’s usually wrong.

Here’s the no news is good news myth. Silence gets misread constantly on social media, because we’re trained to associate mentions with complaints. And yes, I will be real, oftentimes that is what’s happening. And so when we think fewer complaints, less noise, that must mean that there are fewer problems happening.

But mentions should never just be a complaints tracker for you on social media, because they’re really a measure of whether or not people are talking about you at all. Whether that’s positively, negatively, or in a neutral way. A quiet brand isn’t necessarily a healthy brand. I repeat, a quiet brand isn’t necessarily a healthy brand.

You might actually be an invisible brand. And who wants to be invisible? Not me.

[00:02:31] 3 reasons brand mentions decline

Brooke Sellas: There are three very different reasons that your mentions might drop, and only one of them is actually good news. So let’s go over what those reasons might be.

Reason number one is genuine resolution. So if your product improved, if your care team or social media team got faster with their replies and helpful answers, and the issues that used to generate conversation simply don’t exist anymore, that is a good reason.

That’s a good example. This is something that leadership does hope for, and it is real, but it’s also the least common explanation of why mentions have dropped.

Reason number two is that people moved the conversation somewhere you can’t see. So there is a growing case for what we call dark social, or places where it’s not out in public.

So private Slack communities, maybe there are group chats, Facebook groups, Reddit threads under different terminology than what your listening tool is tracking. When this happens, your brand mentions dropped because your listening coverage didn’t move with the conversation, not because the conversation stopped.

So while organically or natively you may see that things dropped, if you’re not using social listening, you only know reactively what people are saying about you. You’re not looking proactively out there at brand keywords, stakeholder names, product names, et cetera. So people are probably still talking about you, but if you’re not using social listening, that conversation could move to one of these dark social places, and you wouldn’t know.

[00:04:24] When your content stops being talk-worthy

Brooke Sellas: Reason three, and the one nobody wants to hear, is that your content stopped being talk-worthy.

People don’t mention brands that don’t give them anything to react to. If your last quarter of content was safe, and generic, and built for reach, impressions, eyeballs, instead of response or meaningful engagement, then that mention decline isn’t good. It’s not a great thing. It’s disengagement from your brand, and this is obviously a very bad thing.

And reason three is honestly, I think, the most common reason you’re seeing a drop in engagement or mentions. So this is important to think about as you’re building out your social media content. Is my content getting people to give me meaningful engagement? I’ve talked about this a million times, but all of the social media algorithms have moved towards meaningful engagement as a variable in the algorithm to show your content to more people or show it to less people.

Are you getting that meaningful engagement or are you missing out?

I introduced the idea of return on conversation a few episodes back, and this is exactly where that comes into play. Every major platform algorithm now rewards conversation over passive consumption.

They want to stop the scroll. So things like comments, replies, threads that go back and forth, all of those types of things, shares, saves, signal to the algorithm that your content is worth showing to more people. So if we think about that, your drop in mentions isn’t an isolated data point. It’s usually the visible symptom of a much bigger problem, which is that your content isn’t generating the conversation or meaningful engagement the algorithm is actively rewarding.

[00:06:35] How fewer mentions can lead to less reach

Brooke Sellas: Fewer mentions lead to less algorithmic reach, so you’re gonna also probably seeing your reach decline on social media. Which leads to fewer people seeing your content in the first place, which leads to even fewer mentions. It’s a never-ending cycle. It compounds in the wrong direction quietly while it looks calm in the dashboard.

So the brands treating mention volume as a vanity metric are the same ones who will be confused in six months about why their reach completely cratered.

[00:07:17] 3 checks to diagnose a drop in mentions

Brooke Sellas: So what do you do about this? I have three checks for you if your mentions have dropped, and you wanna know which of the three reasons is actually driving it.

Number one, I want you to check your listening coverage. Are you tracking beyond just what’s coming to you, right? That’s reactive. Are you proactively using social listening to track where terms about your brand, your stakeholders, your competitors, your products, your industry, all of that.. Are you tracking that on the platforms where your audience actually talks about these things?

Or just the ones you have natively or through your tool? If you’re not using social listening, bottom line, you’re going to miss those other conversations when people are talking about you, but not to you. And a gap in coverage looks identical to a genuine decline until you go looking, so until you use a social listening tool.

There are so many social listening tools you can use, and you know what? Maybe we’ll do a whole social listening tool episode. We use and love Sprout Social. There are smaller tools, like AlertMouse. There are listening tools through Agorapulse. So there’s all kinds of pricing and packaging strategies with social listening, and maybe I’ll just do a whole episode on that coming up.

Makes mental note. Okay.

The second thing I want you to do is to audit your last 10 posts for reply-ability. Not likes, not shares. Ask yourself, did this content, these last 10 posts that we put out on social, give someone a reason to respond, to disagree, to add their own opinions or feelings, to save it or share it?

If the honest answer is no, that’s your decline explained. You need to tell people what to do, entice people to give you that meaningful engagement.

The last thing I want you to do is look at what happened right before the drop. So was there a format change in your content? Did you maybe shift your tone?

Did you pull back on questions or prompts in your caption? Maybe you stopped using polls. Mentions rarely fall for no reason. They fall because something upstream changed, like the format of your content, or it could signal an algorithm change. But I’ve already told you what’s happening with the algorithms.

They’re looking for meaningful engagement. So again, comments, saves, shares. Those should be your three focus areas.

[00:09:53] How to explain the risk to leadership

Brooke Sellas: Now I did get this question from somebody who listens to the podcast, and I want to address it. They sent in a question that says, “How do I convince my team that fewer mentions is a problem when everyone’s relieved the inbox is quieter?”

Totally get this, especially if you do traditional social media management, you’re not really focused on the care or customer support function that social media offers. So I want you to reframe the conversation away from complaint volume entirely, and I want you to show your leaders who might be asking you this question, or your managers, the algorithm angle.

A quieter inbox paired with declining reach is not relief. It’s the platform, the algorithm deprioritizing your content because no one is moved to talk about your content, right? Your content isn’t moving. Comments are moving. Comment threads, really moving. A share is moving it. A save is saving it, right?

So that’s the business risk framed in a language that leadership already understands, which is visibility. So try that angle.

To recap for today, a drop in brand mentions is not, I repeat, not automatically good news. It can mean resolution is going great, but it can also mean missed listening coverage or people who are just disengaging with your brand.

Both not good things.

Platforms reward conversation, saves, shares, meaningful engagement. So fewer mentions often means declining reach, which compounds your problem further. Check your listening coverage, audit your content for reply-ability, and trace what changed right before these drops happened.

Now, if you go through and you do that audit, and the audit tells you that your content isn’t giving people much to talk about, that’s exactly what our free course, Talk-Worthy Content, is built to fix. It walks you through creating content designed to stop the scroll and to earn the kind of conversations that all of the social media platforms are rewarding right now, and that keeps compounding in your favor instead of working against you. You can grab it at bsquared.media.

Go to Courses, and then Talk-Worthy Content. I’ll also put the link in the show notes I’m pointing down if you’re watching this on YouTube. Anywhere you watch or listen, you can go to the transcript and see that link in the show notes, and again, it is a completely free course.

My final thought is that quiet is not necessarily neutral.

It’s either earned, if it’s a good thing, or it’s a warning if it’s those other two examples I gave. The only way to know which one you’re looking at is to actually go check instead of assuming that silence means everything’s fine.

Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.