If you’re looking for brand mention tools to monitor what people say about your brand online, here’s a shortlist for you (so you can limit your Google search and save some time I know you don’t have. ;))
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What is a brand mention?
Anytime anyone mentions your brand online, that’s a brand mention.
Brand mentions can happen on social media platforms but also across the internet: on forums, in videos, in the news, and review sites. Basically, anywhere.
This can happen for various reasons, for example:
- Someone recommends your brand
- Someone complains about your brand (or your product)
- They leave a review
- They ask for people’s opinions
And, of course, the type of mention will call for a specific kind of response from your brand. Because whenever your brand name comes up, whether that’s just your name or people tag your social media profiles (which we’ll call a social mention), you can (and oftentimes should) respond.
And not just when it’s about responding to a complaint and possibly preventing a crisis (or managing it if it’s already blown up.)
You can also respond to praise, positive reviews, and questions about your products. Which is how you build brand loyalty with your customers.
Why are brand mentions important?
Brand mentions can leave you puzzled, wondering whether you should thoroughly investigate them or just leave them be. It’s hard to keep up with everything that is written online about your brand, especially if it has a significant internet presence.
Here is, however, why you should take brand mentions seriously:
Brand Awareness
Every time someone mentions your brand across various platforms, it increases its visibility. The more people hear or see your brand, the more familiar they become with it.
Nevertheless, this can be a double-edged sword.
It’s great if your brand only receives positive opinions; in this case, it boosts your brand’s reputation. But if there are some not-so-positive comments regarding your brand’s performance, the more people read them, the more they may paint a negative picture of your services.
Customer Engagement
Brand mentions often lead to conversations. When people mention a brand in comments, reviews, or social media posts, it creates an opportunity for the brand to engage with customers directly.
For instance, if someone posts an Instagram comment about your brand, responding quickly can make the customer feel valued. Engaging with mentions in real-time shows that the brand is attentive, approachable, and responsive to customer needs, whether the feedback is positive or negative.
Social Proof
In marketing, people tend to trust brands that others talk about. Positive brand mentions act as social proof, making it more likely for potential customers to try the brand because others have endorsed it.
This validation helps reduce anxiety about making an expensive purchase, as consumers often seek reassurance before committing to a decision.
Crisis Management
This aspect is unpleasant to discuss, but it’s vital to mention. While perfecting customer service, brands sometimes make mistakes or overlook certain issues. When this happens, it’s fundamental to address the problem and learn from the situation.
Monitoring brand mentions can alert brands to potential problems or negative feedback early, allowing them to address issues before they escalate into larger reputational challenges.
For all the reasons above, brand mention tools can be incredibly helpful.
What are brand mention tools?
Now, since brand mentions can happen just about anywhere online, it’s often hard to even know about them outside of what’s happening on your social media channels. Because the Internet doesn’t just notify you when people talk about you. (That would make so many lives easier, wouldn’t it?)
And that’s what brand mention tools are for.
Brand mention tools help you find brand mentions and respond to them, wherever they may happen. They usually offer real-time alerts, so you can always be up to date with the conversations happening around your brand.
Depending on the brand monitoring tool, they can also let you respond to the mentions directly in the app, analyze them over time with share of voice, sentiment analysis, and more, and offer other social media management capabilities.
They’re what you need to know what’s going on and what reaction is needed (and often help you actually react.)
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How to use brand mention tools effectively
Brand mention tools need to be incorporated into a larger brand-building and reputation management strategy. Here are a few tips to consider:
- Decide on the keywords to track. It doesn’t just have to be your brand name. It can be your product category, product names, and anything that helps you spot important conversations you can use to inform your marketing strategy.
- Track your competitors’ brands. This will help you analyze what others are doing and, most of all, what their customers (which are also potentially your customers) think about it. It’s also your chance to shine when someone asks for reviews of a competitor or recommendations of a certain type of product.
- Track variations of your brand name. Yes, also the common misspellings of your brand name that you know about. This can help you spot conversations you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.
- Dig into the data. Analyze the sentiment and share of voice not just to know how many people talk about your brand but whether what they say is mostly positive or negative. This is an important part of measuring customer satisfaction and your brand image.
Plus, brand mentions give you tons of insights into your customers’ problems, what’s important to them, and the way they talk about it – which is super helpful in many things, from adjusting your marketing strategy to writing copy for your website or ads.
- Create a brand monitoring workflow. Assign roles within your team – who’s responsible for responding to brand mentions, how to escalate problematic conversations, who analyzes the data, and what happens with the insights.
Top 10 brand mention tools to look into
Without further ado, here are top 10 brand mention tools you should consider 😉
NapoleonCat
If you want to combine discovering social media conversations that include a mention of your brand with the ability to respond to them and other social media management tools like social customer service, reputation management, analytics, and even publishing content, NapoleonCat is definitely a platform to look into. (And yes, I know this was a long sentence, okay?)
With NapoleonCat’s Social Inbox, you can collect all kinds of interactions with your brand in one place, including:
- comments – including those that appear under your content and those that mention you on other social media pages
- reviews (on Facebook and in Google Play and Apple App stores)
- direct messages
- sentiment analysis for all of the above.
The platform offers Auto-moderation that helps automate some brand reactions, like comments, and hiding spam and offensive content – both under organic posts and ads. Complete with social media analytics and competitor analysis, it can be a comprehensive suite to monitor and manage brand reputation and brand awareness.
NapoleonCat also has robust collaboration features like:
- assigning comment threads to individual team members to respond to
- exchanging feedback and notes inside the tool without the need to jump between apps
- a clear view of who’s moderating individual conversations
- sending tickets for consultations
And with the Notification Center inside the platform, it’s easy to follow all the brand mentions, incoming conversations, and reviews in real time and also in bulk.
Supported platforms include:
- Google Business
- YouTube
- Messenger
- TikTok
- Apple App Store
- Google Play Store
For more information on all the features and pricing, here’s a link.
We highly recommend you test NapoleonCat for free here – no credit card required during signup 😉
Brand24
Brand24 is one of the brand mention tools focused on social listening. It lets you continuously track online conversations about your brand across channels, including social media. It includes features such as:
- a mentions feed and alerts
- discussion volume tracking
- sentiment analysis
- hashtag search
- custom reports.
You can sign up for a 14-day free trial to see if what it offers is what you’re looking for.
Mention
As the name suggests, Mention is definitely one of many brand mention tools, and it comes complete with monitoring, social media monitoring, and publishing tools.
It lets you:
- track any keyword, including brand name
- listen to social media conversations and analyze data
- respond to conversations and publish social media content
Mention plans start at $41 for a basic 1-user plan, and you can also test-drive the platform during a free trial.
BrandMentions
You can’t go wrong with that name either. BrandMentions is quite obviously in the “brand mention tools” category. And it collects mentions not just from social media, but from all over the internet.
You can monitor both your brand and competitors, plus any topic and hashtag, with sentiment analysis, reach, and domain influence.
Plans start at $79 a month.
Awario
Awario is another brand mention tool that lets you track conversations about your brand on social media, blogs, forums, news, reviews, and in videos.
You can monitor any keyword, analyze sentiment, track brand mentions, and follow up with your customers and prospects replying to their social media posts and comments.
The platform prices start at $29 a month for monitoring three topics, and you can book a demo on their website to learn more about specific features.
MediaBoard
As the name suggests, MediaBoard is a PR tool that allows you to monitor brand mentions in addition to publishing press releases or contacting journalists. Its social media monitoring portion includes sentiment analysis, reputation risk management, and audience insights.
To learn about the prices, you do need to get in touch with their representatives for a customized offer.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a suite of tools, including brand mention tools, to monitor social media, analyze results, and engage with your audience.
You can expect to be able to do things like:
- track brand health
- analyze business trends
- analyze the competitive share of voice
- track mentions and customer satisfaction over time
- and more.
To know how much you need to pay for that, you need to schedule a demo for a customized quote.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the major platforms focused on online listening designed specifically for content marketing purposes. It helps:
- generate ideas for new, relevant content based on trending topics and keywords
- monitor the performance of your existing content
- find influencers to collaborate with
- see what people are saying about current and emerging products in your category.
You can test out all its features during a 30-day free trial with paid plans starting at $199 a month.
Semrush
Semrush is not your typical brand mention tool, as it is heavily focused on search engine optimization and keyword research. It does include brand mentions, though, including competitive monitoring to track what people say online about your competitors.
Nowadays, it’s a much more comprehensive platform, including features like social media management, link building, and paid advertising.
Plans start at $129.95, and you can test out the tool during a free trial.
YouScan
Besides the more standard brand mention tracking capabilities, YouScan uses image recognition to track brand logos across social media platforms. This gives social media marketers new opportunities to connect to customers, collaborate with influencers, or prevent logo misuse, and protect brand reputation.
Pricing starts at $299 with custom unlimited plans for agencies and brands.
Benefits of brand-mention tools
- They make brand mention monitoring easier, or possible at all. Imagine having to scour the Internet with all the social media profiles, forums, groups, etc. just to find someone talking about your brand. These days, with the sheer amount of conversations going on online, it’s virtually impossible.
- They let you prevent online crises or respond to the ones that couldn’t be prevented on time.
- They’re a powerful tool in protecting your brand reputation.
- They provide tons of valuable insights into your audience and their preferences that you can use to improve your products and services, create more relevant content and more effective marketing campaigns, and keep track of how your brand is doing with your audience overall.
- They help organize team workflows around brand monitoring, analytics, and customer service – often within the same tool.
- And, as a result, they help save tons of time while helping collect and organize customer insights.
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Management with One Tool
- Manage & reply to comments and DMs in one place.
- Monitor ad comments from multiple accounts.
- Automate answers to repetitive questions.
- Schedule posts to multiple accounts, on desktop.
- Analyze performance and monitor hashtags.
- Keep track of your competition.
- Create or schedule in-depth reports in seconds.
How to react to positive brand mentions
First of all, don’t think a positive brand mention doesn’t call for a response. Of course it does! Making a happy customer even happier is one of the best things you can do for your brand image.
It’s a way to delight your customers and show the people who might not know you yet that you really care about your customers.
Things to do:
- Say thank you
- If you can, reward the comment with something
- Collect positive feedback for social proof and user-generated content
How to react to negative brand mentions
- Rule one: respond.
- If it’s a legitimate complaint, offer possible solutions.
- If it’s a customer venting, try taking the conversation private and offer solutions.
- If it’s someone trolling, consider leaving a neutral comment just to show others you’re on top of it.
You may also like:
- Online Reputation Management 101 for Brands
- The Essentials of Google Reviews Moderation
- How to Manage Google Reviews for Multiple Business Locations
- How to Get More Google Reviews
- How to Remove Fake Google Reviews – A Quick Guide
- How to Provide Excellent Social Media Customer Service
- Top 10 Customer Service Tools
