Your brand’s digital presence can either lead you to failure or bring you success. If you worry or wonder about your brand’s reputation, it’s time to take control of it with brand monitoring tools.
What’s brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring tracks and analyzes a brand’s online profile on social media, news articles, blog posts, forums, etc. The goal of brand monitoring is to protect and enhance a brand’s reputation. How do you monitor a brand? After setting up a project with keywords, geographical areas, and other factors, the brand tracking software gathers information To do so, automated tools (robots) scan the internet for specific information. You then receive alerts when relevant brand mentions are found.
Brand monitoring vs. social media monitoring.
Social media is a unique world where everyone talks about brands and events constantly. A single comment can cause damage. For this reason, early alerting could save us from a PR crisis. However, manually tracking each platform in such a dynamic social network is impossible, especially when users don’t always tag brands. Obviously, understanding your brand’s position without this monitoring is challenging. Are you well-regarded? How do users feel about your brand? They might even be mocking your product. Analyzing these aspects and responding appropriately requires remote observation.
Social media monitoring, a subset of brand monitoring, focuses on tracking social media metrics relevant to your company and measuring brand awareness. It involves monitoring:
- Brand or product mentions
- Related hashtags and keywords
- Industry trends on social media platforms
Then, what is social listening? It’s the practice of analyzing the information gathered from social media monitoring to gain deeper insights.
What is the brand monitoring tool used for?
With brand tracking software, you can monitor what’s going on with your PR, marketing, product development, sales, or customer service. So you’ll be able to analyze what has happened and predict future events.
Why is online brand monitoring important?
Brand monitoring is about observing your brand’s online presence to get an idea of how it’s perceived by the public. The benefits of online brand monitoring are many. Among the most important are insights into customer sentiment, early detection of negative press, and increased social media engagement. In this way, you can avoid potential crises, track your brand’s progress over time, and gain insights into customer opinions.
Benefits of brand monitoring services
Maintain your reputation: Building a brand reputation takes time. With an effective brand monitoring strategy, you can measure your brand’s reputation and take the right actions.
The Tide Pod challenge became a crisis for Procter & Gamble because teens were consuming Tide Pods and posting videos of them online. To manage this situation, the company quickly get helped from social monitoring on Talkwalker. Then it launched a safety campaign with a famous athlete and added disclaimers. Their quick action protected their reputation.
Monitor your competitors to stand out: Competitor’s brand reputation monitoring provides valuable insights to improve your strategies. That means you can learn from their mistakes.
Find new valuable content: By tracking good or bad mentions of your brand, you can find new topics to share on your blog or social media.
Build strong relationships with your customers: Replying effectively to your customers builds strong relationships and a strong positioning for your brand.
Handle PR crises the right way: Failure to take timely action when a crisis occurs can negatively impact your brand’s reputation for a long time.
Early detection of treats: You can get alerted of potential cybersecurity threats like phishing attacks, malware, or data breaches targeting their brand or customers.
What type of content should a brand monitor?
| Blogs | Online publications | Podcasts |
| Social listening | Review sites | Brand mentions |
| Forums | Videos |
What’re the ways to measure brand awareness?
| Brand mentions | Staff mentions | Product mentions |
| Inbound links | Influencers | Industry insiders |
| Competitors | Keywords | C-suite shout-outs |
Top 8 brand monitoring tools
How do you monitor a brand? You can do it manually by searching for your brand name or using simple tools (like Google Alerts). But maintaining your brand will be time-consuming, and you can’t gather all the information you need. So it leads to incomplete information. Besides, with new channels appearing, it’ll be harder to keep track.
How can you judge your brand reputation without proper information? Instead of relying on manual ways, most companies use software for monitoring their brand. This allows to focus more on strategies than researching process.
Let’s save time and money in 2024 while tracking your brand’s online presence on multiple platforms by using these tools. We have listed the best brand monitoring tools for you.
Brand24
Brand24 is a highly recommended social listening tool for businesses in the market. It provides cross-platform monitoring, deep insights, and simple reports. Besides, it monitors review sites, online marketplaces, forums, blogs, news sites, newsletters, and podcasts. This user-friendly platform focuses on social media, so it has effective social listening features. This lets you see different metrics for the quality and quantity of your social media mentions. On the other hand, it doesn’t have publishing, scheduling or managing comments features, which means it’s not an all-in-one management solution. Plus, its individual and team plans don’t offer real-time data, which could be a barrier for small businesses.
Focus: Social listening and brand monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $119. Free 14-day trial. No hidden fees. No credit card required.
Awario
Awario offers several advanced features in addition to its core ones. The platform has leads monitoring, Boolean search operators and competitive benchmarking that allow users to perform deeper analysis of their social media presence in more detail. Besides, it provides non-stop monitoring and enables direct response to social media posts. However, Awario’s sentiment analysis can be inaccurate, sometimes misclassifying the sentiment of brand mentions, which affects the analytics. Also, the constant suggestions to link to Slack and connect to social accounts can be annoying. Plus, the free trial offers limited access to certain features, such as the influencer report and sentiment analysis.
Focus: Social listening and brand monitoring.
Pricing: Starts at $29 (yearly). Free access to the Starter plan to create up to 3 alerts.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker offers excellent visualizations for tracking trending topics and sentiment. The tool helps businesses analyze sentiment, track marketing campaigns, and manage their online reputation. Also, Talkwalker has advanced analytics, which includes image and video recognition. These tools help brands measure their digital impact. It’s widely used for consumer insights, crisis management, and competitive intelligence. On the other hand, the tagging system is slow to update, which can cause delays in analysis. Also, the user interface is difficult to use, which could further hinder adoption.
Focus: Social listening, brand monitoring, and analytics.
Pricing: You should contact to book a free demo and learn prices.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch provides real-time insights into consumer behavior, brand reputation, and market trends. The platform offers advanced data visualization to help users understand their audience and industry better. Additionally, it has an extensive data library that spans more than a decade, offering users historical data and insights into past trends. However, Brandwatch can be relatively expensive, and the user interface can be overwhelming for new users. Besides, processing data on the platform can take some time, delaying real-time insights. Overall, it’s a useful tool for larger companies to invest in comprehensive online reputation management.
Focus: Social listening, consumer intelligence, and analytics.
Pricing: You should contact them for free demo and discuss pricing.
Brand Mentions
BrandMentions is designed for tracking and analyzing brand mentions across the web and social media platforms. It provides real-time insights into what people are saying about your brand, products, or services. Therefore, you can discover new marketing opportunities based on your online reputation. With its detailed analytics, the tool helps businesses understand their audience better, track competitors, and optimize their marketing strategies.
Focus: Brand monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $79/mo. 7-day free trial.
Social Searcher
The tool allows you to monitor all public social mentions on social networks and the web. You can quickly track what people are saying about your company, market, product, or service from a single dashboard. It also provides online keyword monitoring tool, so just type your keyword and get the relevant mentions. With this time-saving real-time social media monitoring, you won’t miss important customer feedback. All these developments are notified to you via email alerts.
Focus: Social media monitoring
Pricing: Free | Standard, €8.49/ Month | Professional €19.49/ Month
Google Alerts
Google Alerts can help individuals and small businesses find information online by monitoring specific keywords and phrases. However, it doesn’t provide real-time media monitoring. That’s, it might not be the right solution for large-size companies. Besides, the tool’s accuracy is sometimes questionable, as it can provide irrelevant results or miss relevant content. Since Google Alerts is simple, free, and allows broad Internet searches, it’s still popular.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics isn’t a brand monitoring tool, so it can’t monitor brand mentions or sentiment like social listening tools. But it helps businesses track and analyze website traffic, user behavior, and performance metrics. This can help you understand how consumer interest in your brand evolves and whether you’re reaching the right audiences.
Focus: Website analytics, customer journey
Pricing: Free
| Tool | Focus Area | Pricing | Ease of Use | Data Sources | Real-Time Monitoring | Reporting & Analytics | Integrations | Free Trial/Free Plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand24 | Social listening and brand monitoring | Starts at $119/mo (14-day free trial) | User-friendly | Social media, review sites, forums, blogs, news sites | Limited in lower plans | Social media metrics, sentiment analysis, PDF reports | Slack, Zapier, Google Sheets | Yes, 14-day free trial |
| Awario | Social listening and brand monitoring | Starts at $29/mo (Yearly) | Easy to use | Social media, blogs, news sites, forums | Yes | Sentiment analysis, influencer reports, lead tracking | Slack, Google Analytics | Yes, limited access free plan |
| Talkwalker | Social listening, brand monitoring, analytics | Contact for pricing | Complex UI | Social media, blogs, news sites, forums, podcasts | Yes | Custom dashboards, trend analysis, sentiment analysis | Salesforce, HubSpot, Hootsuite, Socialbakers | Yes, free demo available |
| Brandwatch | Social listening, consumer intelligence, analytics | Contact for pricing | Complex UI | Social media, blogs, news sites, forums, historical data | Delays in processing | Custom reports, trend analysis, consumer insights | Salesforce, Hootsuite, HubSpot | Yes, free demo available |
| BrandMentions | Brand monitoring | Starts at $79/mo (7-day free trial) | User-friendly | Social media, blogs, news sites, forums | Yes | Competitor analysis, sentiment analysis, custom reports | Slack, Google Analytics, Zapier | Yes, 7-day free trial |
| Social Searcher | Social media monitoring | Free, Standard: €8.49/mo, Pro: €19.49/mo | Easy to use | Social media, web | Yes | Simple analytics, keyword tracking, sentiment analysis | None | Yes, free plan available |
| Google Alerts | Internet searches | Free | User-friendly | Web, blogs, news sites | No | Basic keyword alerts | None | Yes, free plan available |
| Google Analytics | Website analytics, customer journey | Free | User-friendly | Website data | N/A | Custom reports, user behavior analysis | Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Ads | Yes, free plan available |
How to choose a brand monitoring tool
Brand tracking tools are critical for effective PR management, but there are many tools. Choosing which one is confusing, so start with reading comparison articles. And decide which fits your company’s needs and budget.
- Many tools offer different features. Some focus on social listening, others on PR. Identify your brand’s main focus.
- What’s your company’s budget for brand monitoring? It’s also an important detail when making a decision.
- Many brand monitoring tools offer you a free trial period or demo call. Test all catchy brand management tools.
Still, it’s challenging to decide. Maybe you need a custom solution? Let’s talk about it. Contact with our experts.
