Understanding who is discussing your brand online requires distinguishing between the number of people talking and the total size of the audience hearing them. The Who’s Talking chart in BrandMentions classifies mentioning authors into four distinct entity types and compares their share of overall conversation volume against their actual impression reach.
The Entity Categories
BrandMentions categorizes every source discussing your brand or monitored keywords into one of four primary entity types:
People: Individual accounts, public creators, and private social media users sharing organic word-of-mouth posts.
Brands & Shops: Commercial business channels, corporate social profiles, and eCommerce stores posting announcements or product updates.
Media: Online news publications, journalism outlets, digital magazines, and industry blogs.
Bots & Spam: Automated scrapers, broadcast channels, feed aggregators, and spam networks.
Understanding Voices vs. Actual Reach
The key value of the Who’s Talking widget lies in comparing two critical dimensions:
1. Mentions Share (Voices)
This reflects the volume of mentions or the total percentage of unique voices generated by each group. For instance, individual People might represent 80% of all accounts talking about your brand.
2. Reach Share (Impression Impact)
This measures the actual potential audience reach delivered by each category. While People may make up 80% of total mentions, a few articles published by major Media outlets might command 70% of your total potential impressions.
How to Interpret Key Scenarios
Evaluating the gap between Mentions Share and Reach Share helps shape your PR and marketing strategy:
High People Share, Low Reach Share: Indicates strong grassroots engagement and direct consumer word-of-mouth. Consider launching community ambassador or micro-influencer programs to amplify individual voices.
Low Media Share, High Reach Share: Shows that while news outlets cover your brand infrequently, their articles drive the vast majority of consumer exposure. Prioritize traditional PR and press release distribution.
High Brand Share: Suggests that most conversation is self-generated by your own marketing channels. Focus on strategies that encourage user-generated content (UGC) and third-party discussions.
High Bots & Spam Share: Signals low-quality or artificial buzz. Use BrandMentions filter tools to exclude automated noise and focus on genuine interactions.
Comparing who is speaking against who is actually being heard ensures you direct your PR and marketing resources toward the channels that deliver maximum impact