Over 5.294 billion people use social media globally. You might think people aren’t talking about your brand on social media, but with this kind of usage – is it an assumption you want to make?
According to a recent study, 94% of business leaders believe social media insights are critical for building brand reputation and loyalty.
It’s not just keeping tabs on mentions—it’s about understanding customer sentiment, identifying opportunities, and mitigating potential crises. With the right tools and strategies, you can drive meaningful engagement and long-term success.
The solution: Brand Monitoring.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Let’s define it. What is ‘Brand Monitoring?’
Definition callout: Brand monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing conversations, mentions, and sentiments about a brand across various platforms, including social media, blogs, forums, review sites, and news outlets.
If someone tweets about your brand positively or shares a concern on a public forum, brand monitoring tools alert you to take appropriate action and build your brand message via your response.
Why Should You Prioritize Brand Monitoring?
There are four big (and obvious) reasons:
- Reputation Management: When you monitor brand mentions, you can quickly identify and address negative feedback or misinformation, preventing it from spiraling out of control.
- Customer Engagement: Engaging with users who mention your brand—whether positively or negatively—builds trust, improves relationships, and shows that your brand values customer feedback.
- Crisis Prevention and Management: Social media and online platforms are highly public, making negative news travel fast. Monitoring your brand can help identify potential issues early, so you can respond before they escalate into a full-blown crisis.
- Competitive Insights: Understanding what people say about your competitors helps you identify gaps in your strategy and leverage opportunities to position your brand more effectively.
To wrap it up, brand monitoring empowers marketers and social media professionals to take a proactive, data-driven approach to building stronger brands.
Types of Brand Monitoring
1.Online Mentions
Tracking and responding to online mentions is vital to brand monitoring.
You should monitor brand or product mentions on:
- Industry Blog Posts or Websites
- Online Forums like Reddit
- Review Sites like Yelp, Google, G2, etc.
- News Platforms
2. Social Media Monitoring
Many people leave their thoughts and opinions about their experiences with brands, products, and services on social media.
Actively monitor and reply to DMs, mentions, hashtags, and other references to your brand/products on social media.
3. Competitor Analysis
While you’re at it, you can monitor your competitors’ brand alongside your own to stay informed about industry trends and opportunities.
Here are some tips on how to keep your competition in check.
- Analyze What People Say About Your Competition – what do you do better? How can you authentically join conversations to provide value or join the conversation?
- Identify Gaps In The Market – how can you outperform your competitors where they’re not engaging with your shared audience.
- Benchmark Your Brand Against Competitors – understand your own share of the voice in the market. Determine whether you’re gaining or losing ground to adjust your strategy to stay competitive.
4. Customer Feedback and Reviews
Monitoring customer feedback and reviews is critical for understanding what your audience values and where improvements are needed.
- Monitor Customer Reviews Across Platforms: Tools like Trustpilot or Yelp enable businesses to track reviews on various sites, providing valuable insights into customer satisfaction and issues.
- Analyze Feedback for Product and Service Improvements: Detailed analysis of feedback can inform product updates or customer service improvements. Positive reviews often highlight strengths, while negative ones reveal actionable areas of concern.
- Address Negative Reviews And Leverage Positive Ones: Respond to negative reviews empathetically, offering solutions when possible. Share positive reviews on social media or your website to boost credibility.
5. Cybersecurity Aspects of Brand Monitoring
As brands expand their online presence, cybersecurity becomes essential to safeguard their assets and reputation.
Consider the following best practices to bullet-proof your approach to brand monitoring.
- Identify Potential Security Threats and Brand Impersonation: Brand impersonation can lead to scams and loss of trust. Tools like ZeroFox help detect fake accounts or unauthorized use of your brand.
- Protect Brand Assets and Intellectual Property: Trademark monitoring tools ensure that your intellectual property is not being misused or infringed upon online.
- Monitor for Data Breaches and Privacy Concerns: Regularly scan for breaches or vulnerabilities using platforms like Cloudflare or data loss prevention (DLP) solutions to secure customer information and proprietary data.
These types of brand monitoring collectively ensure a robust strategy that protects your reputation, engages your audience, and drives informed decision-making.
You can relax, knowing your brand has all their bases covered.
Tools For Brand Monitoring
Allow us to introduce the most popular brand monitoring tools that are at the ready to begin leveraging your efforts.
Google Alerts
So let’s say you just opened a workout studio, and you need to know what people are saying about your business.
Boom. Google alerts will personally ring your bell when a new review or article comes to surface, so you’re the first to know about it.
- Cost: Free
- Pros: Google Alerts is simple to use and sends email notifications whenever your set keywords, such as your brand name, appear in new web content. It’s ideal for basic monitoring tasks and is free of charge.
- Cons: It lacks advanced features like sentiment analysis, competitive tracking, or real-time monitoring. Google Alerts only tracks web mentions, missing out on social media and broader digital contexts.
- When to Use: Perfect for small businesses or individuals seeking basic brand monitoring without investing in paid tools.
Mention
Mention allows marketers to monitor the web and analyze online conversations in a single platform.
- Cost: Starts at $41/month USD
- Pros: Mention specializes in real-time monitoring across social media, blogs, news outlets, and other online platforms. It’s highly effective for PR and brand reputation management and comes equipped with sentiment analysis tools.
- Cons: Pricing can be a barrier for small businesses, and coverage may not extend comprehensively across all niche social platforms.
- When to Use: Ideal for medium to large businesses that need comprehensive monitoring and real-time alerts to manage their online reputation actively.
BuzzSumo
- Cost: Starts at $199/month
- Pros: This tool excels at tracking content performance and brand mentions while offering keyword tracking and competitive analysis. It’s great for discovering trending topics and identifying influencers.
- Cons: High-level features can be expensive for startups or small organizations.
- When to Use: Use BuzzSumo for monitoring your content’s impact and analyzing brand mentions for campaign performance across digital platforms.
CoSchedule
- Cost: Starts at $19/month
- Pros: CoSchedule’s Social Inbox allows you to monitor and engage with social media mentions, DMs, and comments across your social profiles from a single dashboard. It also features a Marketing Calendar, social media publishing, and other marketing features to organize all your marketing in one place.
- Cons: Only paid plans include Social Inbox. Social profiles available for monitoring vary by plan.
- When to Use: Perfect for agencies or teams needing a comprehensive social media management tool that doubles as a brand monitoring solution.
Benefits of Brand Monitoring
Still not convinced to include brand monitoring in your approach?
Check out the benefits brands see when they take brand monitoring more seriously.
1. Enhanced Reputation Management
Proactively managing your brand’s reputation is a cornerstone benefit of brand monitoring.
Proactively Address Potential PR Issues: Brand monitoring tools and strategies allow businesses to spot negative mentions or misinformation as soon as they arise. By addressing these issues promptly, businesses can prevent small problems from escalating into public relations crises.
Build and Maintain A Positive Brand Image: Tracking conversations about your brand helps you understand how people perceive your business. By amplifying positive mentions and addressing negative feedback, businesses can shape a positive brand image over time.
Turn Negative Situations Into Opportunities: Negative feedback, when handled with empathy and professionalism, can turn into an opportunity to showcase your brand’s dedication to customer satisfaction. Publicly resolving complaints in a positive manner often earns respect and trust from a broader audience.
2. Improved Customer Engagement
Effective brand monitoring enhances how businesses interact with their customers by enabling real-time engagement.
- Identifying and Responding to Customer Needs in Real-Time: With tools for monitoring social mentions, businesses can quickly respond to customer inquiries or concerns, even before the customer formally reaches out. This agility reflects a brand that listens and cares.
- Personalizing Customer Interactions Based on Insights: Insights gathered through brand monitoring help businesses tailor their interactions. Whether it’s addressing specific needs or referencing past interactions, personalized engagement makes customers feel valued.
- Building Stronger Customer Relationships Through Active Listening: Brand monitoring goes beyond responding to mentions; it involves actively listening to understand customer preferences and sentiment. When customers see a brand engaging with them thoughtfully, it fosters loyalty and strengthens relationships.
Take this example from Webstreet who used brand monitoring to ensure they stayed up to date on the latest trends, topics, and traditions.
By utilizing hands-on brand monitoring, their business never skipped a beat and stayed ahead of the curve.
Because of this, they mastered creating timely and relevant content that “wowed” their audience.
Thanks to media monitoring, WebStreet was able to catch conversations of proactive inquiries from their customers and answer the questions before it was too late.
“There was this one time when a regulatory change was gaining traction in the alternative investment space. Thanks to our media monitoring, we spotted the conversation early on.
We quickly created content through blog posts and LinkedIn newsletters that addressed the potential impacts, which positioned WebStreet as a leader in helping investors understand the change.”
3. Risk Management
Brand monitoring plays a critical role in identifying and mitigating risks to your brand’s reputation and digital safety.
- Identifying and Mitigating Potential Risks to Brand Reputation: From unfavorable mentions to full-blown misinformation campaigns, risk management begins with awareness. Monitoring tools help detect risks early, giving brands time to develop appropriate responses.
- Addressing Cybersecurity Threats Promptly: Monitoring for unauthorized uses of your brand or products (e.g., fake accounts or counterfeit goods) ensures swift action against these threats. This helps protect not just the brand, but also its customers from scams or phishing attacks.
- Protecting Brand Integrity in the Digital Space: Tracking mentions and digital activity involving your brand name helps protect intellectual property and assets. This ensures that your brand is not misrepresented or harmed by external threats.
By leveraging the benefits of brand monitoring, businesses can build a strong foundation for managing reputation, fostering customer loyalty, and safeguarding their digital presence.
Cafely is a perfect example of a company that leveraged brand monitoring for risk management. They recognized that there was a potential conversation out there that could require some damage control.
See how brand monitoring helped eradicate the problem.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have a need to resort to any kind of damage control. But having a consistent approach to media monitoring kept us motivated, especially after hearing about positive sentiments people say about our brand. It’s also boosted our dedication to our objectives – empowering us to believe we’re on the right track and influencing us to further try out innovative techniques to get our brand to more people even those outside of the coffee niche. “
It’s a relief to know that through brand monitoring your team will be the very first to know if there is something negative brewing about the brand.(And also be the first ones to celebrate when there’s not).
How to Implement an Effective Brand Monitoring Strategy
Now it’s time to implement your brand monitoring strategy.
Set Clear Goals
Begin by defining what you want to achieve through brand monitoring. Whether your focus is on improving customer service, identifying influencers, tracking the performance of marketing campaigns, or monitoring customer sentiment, having specific objectives ensures that your efforts are focused and measurable.
Choose the Right Tools
Selecting the right tools is crucial. Consider both your goals and budget when choosing brand monitoring tools.
For basic needs, free tools like Google Alerts are excellent for tracking web mentions. For more advanced monitoring, tools like Mention or BuzzSumo offer real-time updates, sentiment analysis, and competitive tracking.
Pro Tip: If budget allows, invest in tools that combine multiple capabilities (e.g., social media monitoring and analytics) to streamline your process.
Monitor Consistently
Regular monitoring is essential for spotting trends, addressing issues promptly, and staying ahead of conversations about your brand. Set a schedule for reviewing mentions, and use tools that provide real-time notifications to ensure you’re always in the loop.
Act on Insights
The data gathered through brand monitoring is valuable only if it informs action. Use insights to refine your marketing strategies, improve customer service, and identify content opportunities. For instance, if social listening reveals that customers are seeking a specific product feature, incorporate this feedback into product development.
Pro Tip: Track patterns in sentiment over time to measure the impact of changes or campaigns.
Engage Authentically
When engaging with mentions or reviews, maintain a genuine and human tone. Positive mentions can be amplified by thanking users, while negative feedback should be met with empathy and a willingness to resolve issues.
Frequently Asked Questions
What keywords should I monitor?
Brand monitoring goes beyond your brand. You should include variations of your brand name, product names, and commonly misspelled versions.
For example, if your brand is “Awesome Tech,” track keywords like “AwesomeTech,” “AweSomeTech,” or common shorthand used by customers.
Other keywords you can monitor include:
- Industry Keywords: Track keywords relevant to your industry, such as services, products, or trends. This helps you identify broader conversations where your brand can join or contribute.
- Competitor Keywords: Monitoring competitors’ names and products provides valuable insights into their reputation and customer sentiment, helping you benchmark your brand effectively.
- Sentiment Keywords: Use terms associated with emotions, like “problem,” “love,” or “recommend,” paired with your brand name to gauge sentiment more accurately.
Example: A coffee brand might monitor terms like “best coffee,” “coffee complaints,” “delayed coffee delivery,” or hashtags like #CoffeeLovers.
How can I train my team on brand monitoring?
To help your team confidently respond to brand mentions, you should outline a Brand Monitoring process and toolkit for your company. This can be done in four simple steps:
- Set Clear Guidelines: Outline what to monitor, response protocols, and escalation processes. Clarify how to handle sensitive information or negative feedback professionally.
- Teach Tool Usage: Ensure your team is well-versed in using tools like Mention, Google Alerts, or Hootsuite. Offer hands-on sessions or provide documentation for quick reference.
- Encourage Empathy and Personalization: Train your team to engage authentically, using the brand’s tone and voice while tailoring responses to the customer’s context.
- Provide Ongoing Training: Conduct regular workshops to keep the team updated on the latest tools, trends, and monitoring techniques.
Should I make changes to my brand monitoring process or approach?
Brand monitoring is never “done.” Regularly review metrics like the volume of mentions, sentiment analysis, and response times to measure the effectiveness of your monitoring efforts.
What if my brand changes?
As your brand evolves, update your keyword list to include new product names, industry buzzwords, or emerging competitors.
How do I resolve potential PR issues, negative comments, or disgruntled customers?
If you use brand monitoring to identify issues in real-time, you can develop PR strategies to address them before they escalate.
Recommended Reading: How To Manage A Social Media Crisis Without Losing Your Mind
