If you’re looking for brand monitoring tools to help your brand or agency monitor social media and other places on the internet effectively and at scale, here are some really good examples with a handful of best practices on how to use them.
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What is brand monitoring?
In short, brand monitoring is tracking all the conversations happening publicly online that involve your brand, including:
- brand mentions
- reviews and comments
- recommendations
- brand name and logo use
- brand/product comparisons
- etc.
Unless you actively monitor the Internet and social media for the above, you probably won’t know those conversations are happening. (Besides perhaps those that happen on your own social media accounts.)
And if you don’t know about them?
Why is brand monitoring important?
Well, if you don’t know about them, you can’t do some essential things when it comes to building and protecting your brand reputation and the resulting customer loyalty. For example:
- prevent brand crises (that often get started with a single customer complaint that could’ve been resolved.)
- spot sales opportunities (when someone recommends you, and you can jump in to answer questions. OR if someone recommends a competitor, and you can jump in with a counter offer.)
- respond to reviews – both positive and negative – to build brand loyalty and a positive customer experience
- get a general feel for what people think about your brand and how they’re expressing it – and more detailed data you can analyze
- improve your product and marketing strategy based on what people actually say
- collect user-generated content for your social media channels
- find out when people misuse your logo or brand name, steal your content, or otherwise post content that’s bad for your brand.
Which metrics are the most important for brand monitoring?
As anything that revolves around brand and marketing, brand monitoring needs a strategy, and it needs precise metrics to actually be helpful as a brand-building tactic. Metrics will help you understand:
- Which marketing initiatives (campaigns, content, etc.) drive customer engagement and loyalty
- How your customer service impacts your brand image
- Your overall brand health – what people think about your brand and how what you do impacts it
There are several categories of brand monitoring metrics that make up overall brand health, and these include:
Brand awareness
- Reach: The total number of people exposed to your brand online.
- Impressions: The number of times people see your brand content flash across their screens, e.g., your ads, videos, blog articles, etc.
Brand sentiment
- Positive, neutral, and negative mentions: The general sentiment of brand mentions on social media, review sites, and other platforms.
Social media metrics
- Engagement on social media, including likes, shares, and comments.
- Follower growth: The growth of the number of followers on your social media profiles over time.
Online reviews
- Average review score: The average rating people give your brand in reviews.
- Number of reviews: The total quantity of reviews across different platforms.
Brand loyalty
- Customer retention rate: The percentage of customers who continue to buy your products or services.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): The total revenue your business can expect from a customer throughout their entire relationship with your brand.
Competitive analysis
- Share of voice: Your brand’s online visibility and mentions compared to your competitors.
- Competitor mentions: The frequency and sentiment of mentions about your competitors (yes, you can, and probably should, track those too.)
Web traffic and SEO
- Brand-related search volume: The number of times people use the search engine to look up your brand name.
- Organic traffic: The number of visitors coming to your website from organic search results.
Influencer impact
- Influencer reach and engagement: The impact of influencers mentioning or promoting your brand across the Internet.
- Influencer sentiment: The sentiment of influencer discussions around your brand.
Crisis monitoring
- Response time: How quickly your brand responds to negative events or brand crises.
- Resolution rate: The effectiveness of your brand’s actions in resolving issues.
Customer feedback
- Customer surveys (NPS and others): Gathering feedback through surveys to measure satisfaction and perception.
- Customer complaints: Monitoring and addressing customer complaints.
What are brand monitoring tools?
Brand monitoring tools are just what they sound like – tools that help you monitor your brand mentions and track the above metrics effectively and at scale. Depending on the type of tool, they’ll let you monitor brand mentions and customer feedback, analyze your competition, and measure things like brand sentiment and share of voice.
These tools can be:
- social listening tools a.k.a. brand mention tools
- brand analytics tools
- online survey tools
- customer service tools
- social media management tools
- reputation management tools
Essentially, it’s almost impossible to do proper brand monitoring without brand monitoring tools. The Internet is just too massive, and you’d have to hire an army of people to comb through all the websites, forums, review sites, comparison sites, and social media platforms every day – and still probably would only be able to track a fraction of what’s being said about your brand.
Especially as your brand grows and gets more publicity and engagement.
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How to use brand monitoring tools effectively
Start with incorporating brand monitoring tools into your overall brand-building and reputation management strategy – they should be an integral part of it. Here are a few tips to consider:
1. Decide on what to track. It doesn’t just have to be your brand name, but also things like your product category, product names, industry keywords – anything that helps you spot important conversations.
2. Track your competitors’ brands. Select a few of your most important competitors and monitor their brand names, too. Not just to analyze what they’re doing as brands but also what their customers (which are also potentially your customers) think about it. Plus, it’s your chance to shine when someone asks for reviews of a competitor or recommendations of a certain type of product – and you can jump right in with what you have to offer.
3. Track different variations of your brand name. Do a bit of research on what people type in the search bar when looking for your brand – including the common misspellings of your brand name that you know about. This can help you spot conversations you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.
4. Dig into the data. Analyze the sentiment and share of voice to know whether what they say is primarily positive or negative. This is an integral part of measuring customer satisfaction and your brand image.
Plus, monitoring brand conversations will give you in-depth insights into your customers’ problems, what’s important to them, and the way they talk about it. This, in turn, is super helpful at a strategic level but also a tactical level, for example, to write compelling marketing copy for your website or ads.
5. Create a brand monitoring workflow. Assign roles within your team to make it clear who’s responsible for responding to brand mentions, running customer reviews, or analyzing specific metrics and customer insights. Create clear workflows around escalating problematic conversations and acting when there’s an impending crisis.
Top 10 brand monitoring tools
Without further ado, here are the top 10 brand monitoring tools and how to make the most of them.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat lets you combine discovering social media conversations that include your brand with the ability to respond to them and engage with your customers. It also offers other social media management tools like social customer service, reputation management, analytics, and even publishing content.
With NapoleonCat’s Social Inbox, you can collect all kinds of interactions with your brand in one dashboard, including:
- comments – under your organic content and ads, and also those that include a mention of your brand 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 so that you can automate some of your brand reactions, like answering FAQs in the comments or hiding spam and offensive content. It also includes robust social media analytics and competitor analysis, letting you track any public social media account of a competitor (within the supported social media platforms listed below in this section.)
It’s also super handy for teams, letting you create straightforward collaboration workflows:
- assign comment threads as customer service tickets to individual team members
- exchange feedback and notes inside the tool
- see who’s currently moderating individual conversations
- send tickets for consultations, e.g., to an external team or the client’s team if you’re an agency
The Notification Center inside the platform makes following all the brand mentions, incoming conversations, and reviews really easy, with real-time alerts.
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 most popular brand monitoring tools focused on social listening. You can use it to track online conversations about your brand across channels, including on social media platforms. Some of the helpful features include:
- all mentions collected in one feed with real-time alerts
- sentiment analysis
- discussion volume tracking
- custom brand monitoring reports.
The platform offers a 14-day free trial.
Awario
Awario is another brand monitoring tool to track conversations about your brand on social media, blogs, forums, news, reviews, and in videos.
You can, among others:
- monitor selected keywords,
- analyze sentiment,
- track brand mentions,
- and follow up with your customers and prospects, replying to their social media posts and comments.
Plans 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
MediaBoard is a comprehensive PR tool for monitoring brand mentions in addition to publishing press releases and contacting journalists. Its social media monitoring tools include 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.
Mention
Mention is another one of many brand monitoring tools available (it is a crowded market). Its capabilities include brand monitoring, social media monitoring, and publishing tools.
Use it to:
- track any keyword, including brand name or your competitors’ names
- monitor social media conversations and respond to them
- analyze data
- publish social media content
Mention plans start at $41 for a basic 1-user plan. You can also give the platform a test drive during a free trial.
BrandMentions
BrandMentions collects, well, brand mentions 😀– not just from social media, but from all over the internet.
You can use it to monitor both your brand and your competitors’ brands, along with any topic or hashtag. It also tracks metrics like sentiment, reach, and domain influence.
Plans start at $79 a month.
Semrush
Semrush is not your typical brand monitoring tool. The platform is heavily focused on search engine optimization and keyword research, but these days, it also includes other aspects of marketing, including brand mentions and competitive monitoring besides other areas like social media management, link building, and paid advertising.
Plans start at $129.95, and a free trial is available, too.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a suite of brand monitoring tools for social media, including analytics and engagement tools.
Within its brand monitoring core, it lets you:
- track brand health
- analyze business trends
- analyze the competitive share of voice
- track mentions and customer satisfaction over time
- and more.
For pricing info, you need to schedule a demo and get a customized quote.
YouScan
YouScan is definitely an interesting tool here, as it 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, prevent logo misuse, and protect brand reputation.
It also offers standard online monitoring to keep track of keywords such as your brand name or your competitors’ names.
Pricing starts at $299 with custom unlimited plans for agencies and brands.
Keyhole
Keyhole advertises itself as a social media analytics tool that lets you analyze multiple profiles, brand mentions, campaigns, and influencers. Here are the tools it offers:
- social listening and campaigns
- profile analytics
- influencer tracking
- social media trends
- social media publishing
- historical data for past analytics, posts, and campaigns
Keyhole offers a range of paid plans, from individual to enterprise and campaign, and you can check them out here.
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You may also like:
- Online Reputation Management 101 for Brands
- 10 Top Brand Mention Tools to Help Protect Your Brand Reputation
- 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
