How to Track Twitter Mentions in 2024 [No-Code]

In 2015, Netflix made headlines as the most talked-about TV network in the US.

Fast forward to 2016, Netflix expands to India, and Meltwater India reports this launch as a success as it gained more than 35,000 mentions on Twitter.

Every brand wants to know how popular it is on social media and well X (Twitter) is visited by 250 million people every day, making it one of the most popular social media platforms.

But we’re not Netflix, no one is going to get these stats for us.

So, what if you could track your own brand's popularity on Twitter?

In this article, we’ll learn how to track Twitter mentions and build a Twitter mentions tracker without writing any code.

What are Twitter mentions?

Twitter mentions are tweets that mention your brand’s username, or relevant keywords and hashtags. Commonly, there are types of brand mentions on Twitter.

1. Direct mentions: Tweets that directly mention your brand username (e.g., "@lobstrio").
2. Indirect mentions: Tweets that mention your brand name, relevant keywords or hashtags (e.g., "Lobstr.io", “Lobstr Twitter scraper” or "#lobstrio").

🦀

But why track them in the first place?

Why track Twitter mentions?

There are several advantages of tracking your brand mentions on Twitter.

They tell you a lot about your brand awareness among Twitter users, you can:

1. Monitor brand reputation and customer feedback
2. Read relevant conversations and engage with your audience
3. Identify influencers and potential brand ambassadors
4. Track industry trends for creating Twitter marketing strategies
5. Improve customer service and respond to concerns

How do I see all my mentions on Twitter?

Unfortunately, Twitter analytics tool won’t help you with mentions. You don’t get this data in analytics.

You only see your own posts data in the X analytics dashboard.

But does Twitter notify you of mentions?

Yes, you get a notification whenever someone mentions you directly on Twitter.

This means if your @username is used in a tweet, you’ll receive a notification.

You can view all direct mentions in the notification tab.

But X (Twitter) won’t track indirect mentions. There’s no native feature to read and track your brand related hashtags or keywords.

So how to find and track indirect mentions of your brand on Twitter?

How to track Twitter mentions (both direct & indirect)?

We can use Twitter advanced search for monitoring mentions i.e. finding all tweets containing our keyword, hashtag, or username.

Twitter advanced search allows us to search tweets based on specific criteria like keywords, hashtags, phrases, and usernames.

You can even refine your search by applying filters like replies, links, engagement, dates, and language. Twitter also supports advanced search parameters like * and -.

But there’s no native way to store this data in an excel sheet or import it for analysis. Manually copy pasting tweets would take ages.

So how to find and store Twitter mentions? Well Grok did give us a solution. There are plenty of 3rd party tools for that. Let’s have a look at the most popular ones.

Best tools to track Twitter mentions for analysis

There are a lot of 3rd party social media monitoring tools that track social media mentions. I actually tested all tools that appear on Google search page 1.

The top 3 tools that are actually affordable and offer the most comprehensive reporting are

1. Brand24
2. Awario
3. Tweet Binder

Let’s compare them quickly to help you choose the best option that suits your needs.

1. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that helps businesses track their online presence, reputation, and engagement. With its user-friendly interface and robust features.

Features

1. Provides real-time monitoring across social media, news, and blogs
2. Offers AI powered analysis
3. Has an influencer identification feature
4. Offers a sentiment analysis tool
5. Provides detailed analytics and reporting
6. Customizable Real-time notifications
7. API access for developers
8. Mobile app for instant access

Pricing

1. Free tier: 14 days free trial
2. Premium: $5 per 1000 mentions

2. Awario

Just like Brand24, Awario is also a brand management tool that tracks the conversations about your business across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, and reviews.

Features

1. Real-time monitoring with boolean search and advanced filtering
2. Influencer identification along with influencer scoring
3. Content suggestions and competitor analysis
4. Review monitoring from various sources
5. Social media management tools integration
6. Mobile app for instant access
7. Social listening API

Pricing

1. Free tier: 30000 free mentions free trial
2. Premium: $0.4 per 1000 mentions

3. Tweet Binder

Tweet Binder is a Twitter hashtag and keyword analysis tool. It specifically works on Twitter only, tracking keywords, profiles, trends, and much more.

Features

1. Monitor keywords, hashtags, @mentions, and URLs on Twitter
2. Get instant insights into a Twitter account's performance
3. Create personalized reports with customizable dashboards
4. Top Influencers identification and top tweeters' report
5. Sentiment analysis with a well-structured report
6. Download or export data for further analysis
7. API access for developers

Pricing

1. Free tier: 200 mentions from last 7 days
2. Premium: $2.15 per 1000 mentions

There are many other tools like Mentions, SproutSocial, and BrandMentions. I didn’t include them in this list because they offer similar features but are more expensive than our top 3.

These social media monitoring tools do offer in-depth insight, but what if I need to track 100s of keywords or 100s of accounts?

Limitations

It’s not always about reporting.

If your goal is to gather data at that scale and analyze it yourself or build apps these tools have limitations like

1. Scalability
2. Affordability

Social media monitoring tools have scalability limitations due to data limits, API restrictions and many other reasons.

You can’t track 100s of keywords or 100s of accounts using any of the tools I mentioned above.

Also these tools can be prohibitively expensive, with costs adding up quickly as the number of keywords, mentions, and users increases.

The cheapest tool in our list charges you at least $0.4 per 1000 mentions. This price tag is not suitable for collecting Twitter mentions data at scale.

So what's the solution? Simply build your own Twitter mentions tracker.

How to build your Twitter mentions tracker

By building your own tracker, you can overcome the limitations of social media monitoring tools and create a solution that is both scalable and cost-effective.

You can collect and analyze an unlimited amount of data, without breaking the bank. Plus, you can customize it to meet your specific needs and integrate it with platforms.

But how to build one? There are 2 ways to do it.

1. Use Twitter’s official API
2. Scrape tweets that mention your brand

Does Twitter offer an API for brand monitoring?

Yes, you can use Twitter’s monitoring and social listening API to build your personal Twitter mentions tracker. But but but… we still have some barricades to cross:

1. It has a rate cap
2. It’s super expensive.
3. It requires coding knowledge

But scraping tweets will also require coding skills right? Nope!

You can scrape Twitter data including Profiles, User Tweets, Hashtags, Mentions, etc using no-code Twitter scrapers like Lobstr.io.

Building twitter mentions tracker without coding

Lobstr is a cloud-based platform offering a variety of no-code scrapers for different platforms including Twitter. You can use Lobstr to find and monitor Twitter trends and brand mentions.

For this tutorial, we'll be using Lobstr Twitter Search Results Scraper.

Cool features

1. Scrape all latest and top tweets and retweets
2. 25+ vital metrics e.g. tweet data, user data, retweet data
3. Cloud-based, no install required
4. Schedule the scraper for monitoring and regular updates
5. Export data directly to Google Sheets and Amazon S3
6. Developer-friendly API access

Pricing

1. Free tier: 56000 mentions per month
2. Premium: $0.03 per 1000 mentions

Let’s learn how to create your own Twitter mentions tracker with this no-code beauty.

How to track Twitter mentions using Lobstr.io

We’re going to build an awesome Twitter Mentions Tracker using Lobstr.io in 5 simple steps. No coding, no nerdy-shit involved.

1. Get Twitter search URLs
2. Create Squid and sync your Twitter account
3. Add tasks and adjust automation behavior
4. Schedule and launch
5. Enjoy

Let’s go 💨

Step 1 - Get Twitter search URL

First step is pretty simple. We need input. In our case, this input will be a Twitter search URL. In my previous how-to guide, I used the search bar and copied a simple search URL.

But for building a brand mentions tracker, we’ll need to refine our search using Twitter’s advanced search and then copy the URL.

I want to track both direct and indirect mentions. We’re going to track Twitter mentions of our competitor Phantombuster during the last 4 months i.e. Jan 2024 to Apr 2024.

We’ll search and move to the latest tweets. Then simply copy the URL from the address bar. I’ll do it 2 more times to get search URL for their @username and #hashtag too.

Here we go:

1. https://twitter.com/search?f=live&q=Phantombuster%20until%3A2024-04-25%20since%3A2024-01-01&src=typed_query
2. https://twitter.com/search?f=live&q=(%23phantombuster)%20until%3A2024-04-25%20since%3A2024-01-01&src=typed_query%20until%3A2024-04-25%20since%3A2024-01-01&src=typed_query)
3. https://twitter.com/search?q=(%40phantombuster)%20until%3A2024-04-25%20since%3A2024-01-01&src=typed_query&f=live%20until%3A2024-04-25%20since%3A2024-01-01&src=typed_query&f=live)

Now let’s go to our Lobstr.io dashboard and set up our tracker.

Step 2 - Create Squid and sync account

In your lobstr.io dashboard, click the new squid button and search ‘Twitter’. Select Twitter Search Results Scraper.

You’ll be asked to sync a Twitter account. To sync your Twitter account, all you have to do is install the Lobstr account sync Chrome extension.

Once you’re done, you’re ready to feed your input to the scraper.

Step 3 - Add tasks & adjust behavior

Paste the URLs we copied in step 1. You can bulk upload your list of URLs if you’ve got thousands of them. 😎 Once done, click save and move to settings.

In settings you can select max tweets to scrape, run end behavior and configure the concurrency to increase the speed.

After adjusting the scraper's behavior, click Save and set up notifications. Again click Save, this will take you to the launch board.

Step 4 - Schedule and launch

In the launch menu, we have got 2 options. Manual launch and repeated launch. Since I want to find Twitter mentions data of the last 4 months, I can select Manual and start scraping.

But what if I want to track Twitter mentions of Phantombuster on a monthly basis? To do so, we need to configure the schedule. Click Repeatedly and you’ll see the scheduling options.

Let’s schedule our Twitter mentions tracker to find and extract all tweets that mention any of our 3 inputs, on every 30th day of the month.

Once done with launch preferences, if you’ve selected Manual, your scraper will run instantly. But if you’ve selected a schedule, it’ll run automatically on the time and day you’ve selected.

But how do I get the data?

Step 5 - Set up delivery and enjoy

Once the scraping is complete, you can download your data in CSV format, which can be easily viewed and analyzed in Excel or Google Sheets.

But what if I need data instantly? Manually opening the dashboard, downloading the output file, and importing it into Excel or Google Sheets can become a tedious task.

Lobstr offers a more efficient solution for that. With Lobstr, you can export your data directly from the scraper to Google Sheet, Amazon S3, or even Webhook.

To set the delivery option, click the Delivery button in your console. Choose and configure your preferred delivery method and click Save.

Now whenever the scraper runs, your data will be exported automatically to the application you’ve integrated.

FAQs

What is a Twitter monitoring tool?

A Twitter monitoring tool is a software or platform that tracks and analyzes Twitter activity related to specific keywords, hashtags, or accounts.

Twitter monitoring tools are designed to provide data on engagement, sentiment, and trends on specific topics or brands.

Are Twitter mentions public?

Yes, Twitter mentions are public, meaning anyone can see tweets that mention your Twitter handle (@username), hashtag, or keyword.

Is it legal to track Twitter mentions?

Yes, it is legal to track Twitter mentions, as long as you comply with Twitter's rules and guidelines, and applicable data protection regulations.

What can I gain from tracking Twitter mentions?

By tracking Twitter mentions, you can identify relevant mentions of your brand, product, or service, and gain valuable insights into Twitter sentiment

This helps you understand public perception, respond to customer feedback, and refine your marketing campaign for better results.

Can I see Twitter users’ public profile data and tweets using this tool?

No, this tool only works for Twitter search results. But you can use our Twitter Profiles Scraper and Twitter User Tweets Scraper to get all profile data and tweets of any user.

Conclusion

That's a wrap on How to track Twitter mentions in 2024. Tracking Twitter mentions is key to understanding your target audience.

It helps you know your customers better. Protecting your brand image is another key benefit. It prevents reputational damage. Monitoring social mentions helps you stay ahead.