11 Best Brand Monitoring Tools for Brand Monitoring & Protection
Some of the best brand monitoring tools are Mentionlytics, Brandwatch, BuzzSumo, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social.
In this list, we’re going to demonstrate how your business’s reputation and longevity are linked to monitoring your brand’s public perception. Now more than ever, there are numerous ways for you to be aware of the topics your audience is talking about in general, and more specifically what they are saying about you.
So, we’ve gathered the 11 best brand monitoring tools to give you a comprehensive peek inside the world of mentions monitoring and understanding your audience’s sentiment.
Let’s explore the concepts of brand perception and brand protection.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of today May 16th, 2022.
Table of Contents
- What is Brand Monitoring?
- What are the Benefits of Brand Monitoring?
- Brand Monitoring Tools Comparison Table
- Tool #1: Mentionlytics
- Tool #2: Brandwatch
- Tool #3: BuzzSumo
- Tool #4: Hootsuite
- Tool #5: Sprout Social
- Tool #6: TalkWalker
- Tool #7: Mention
- Tool #8: Awario
- Tool #9: Keyhole
- Tool #10: Semrush
- Tool #11: Google Alerts
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the action of tracking multiple channels to single out where your brand has been mentioned. Being aware of the medium and the way people talk about your company allows you to better understand the image they have formed of it, and enables you to gather valuable feedback from your target audience. You have the possibility of being on the lookout for potential crises, reply to questions or criticism as soon as possible and understand the concept of brand sentiment.
On that note, brand monitoring consists of collecting information, analysing it, and applying the knowledge you have received from tracking your mentions. Businesses use brand monitoring as it is crucial to care about what the audience thinks. Understanding the sentiment around your brand and products/services, as well as the way you address those comments plays a significant role in your brand’s growth. For instance, the hospitality and consumer service industries are greatly benefited from brand monitoring.
Brand reputation is one of the most important aspects of your business, especially in the digital age, where everyone is having conversations online.
What are the benefits of Brand Monitoring?
Why does brand monitoring matter? Well, one of the greatest impacts of brand monitoring is that it allows you to listen to and learn from your audience, while actively shaping the way your brand is being perceived.
Let’s check out some of the ways brand monitoring empowers your brand’s health.
Benefit #1: You improve your marketing impact
First things first, you get a chance to advance your content marketing strategy, as long as you have solid information and a concrete social media strategy in place. But, what does this include?
– Keyword monitoring
Regarding SEO and PPC campaigns, keyword monitoring consists of tracking a brand’s position in Google results as opposed to competitors for any given non-branded keywords. Keyword monitoring is about brand placement and creating performance reference points, which are later improved with the help of SEO strategies.
– Tracking market trends
This is a great way to stay ahead of changes that may occur in each business industry and compare the company’s performance with the industry average. Tracking market trends helps you get a clear picture of a business’s performance and predict where current business operations and practices will lead you.
– Monitoring a campaign’s impact
Monitoring your marketing campaigns allows you to check if your campaigns are working and the performance of your marketing techniques. By doing so, you comprehend better your customer’s behaviour, grasp the techniques that have proven most efficient, and as a result, you establish a good reputation.
– Finding influencers
Discovering the right influencers for your niche can help you grow your audience organically and consequently increase your brand awareness and reach. Influencers usually are experts in their fields, and their followers trust them; they follow their recommendations and adopt their opinions. So, influencers can help enhance your credibility and trust around your target audience.
Benefit #2: You improve your customer support
Brand monitoring can improve customer support by keeping an eye on social media mentions from customers asking or complaining about your products or services. Improving your customer support means understanding your customers’ needs by seeking feedback and using sentiment analysis to identify their emotions and opinions about your online presence.
As a consequence, having a monitoring tool in place for detecting feedback and negative comments the minute they show up online gives you the lead to respond immediately, and handle a customer experience, especially during a potential crisis. The faster you respond, the quicker you will resolve any problem or misunderstanding.
The first step to addressing your audience’s needs is to identify and understand them; by doing so you appear to be listening to what they are saying online and taking it under serious consideration, their opinions matter to you and for that reason, your brand engagement and loyalty will increase.
Benefit #3: You protect your brand reputation
By tracking brand mentions on social media and the web, companies manage to protect their reputation by addressing negative mentions, comments, and reviews about their business. But why is reputation management important? Well, businesses with positive reputations draw attention to more customers. They are seen as more valuable, and that usually enables them to price at a premium; that means their customers display loyalty and buy a variety of the products and services the brand offers.
In addition, according to Reputation X, 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Simply put, people feel free to trust strangers as much as friends or family. So, the overall sentiment of your online reviews can help the audience make purchasing decisions and your business stand out from its competitors. As 97% of consumers search online for local businesses, it is safe to say that you should invest in your online presence.
Benefit #4: You keep an eye on your competitors
This could be characterised as one of the most important brand monitoring benefits, as it allows companies to keep an eye on their competitors, by tracking their pricing information, keywords, mentions, reviews, and everything else that could enhance their competitive advantage. Keeping an eye on your competition helps you understand your advantages and disadvantages concerning others in the market. Comprehending your competitors’ current plans or future ones and having the necessary information to develop marketing strategies will help to create your competitive advantage.
This is where competitor analysis steps in. It enables you to identify your product’s demand in the market and find ways to make it stand out, so you attract people’s attention more than your competitors do. The importance of competitor analysis lies in the fact that once you get to know your competitors you can find a way to outsmart them; by creating better strategies and improving your market share.
Brand Monitoring Tools Comparison Table
Below you will find a comparison table between the brand monitoring tools on this list, so you can have all the necessary information gathered in one place.
The table covers the following information:
- Free trial; whether the tool has a free trial session
- Pricing start; what is the starting price of every brand monitoring tool
- Best feature; what is the best feature of every software
- Best for; what they are most known for
- Customer support; the means they use to respond to customers
Now, it’s time to move to a more detailed description of the above brand monitoring tools.
#1 Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is an Intelligence Monitoring Platform. It enables you to track mentions, keywords, and backlinks for your brand, your product, or your competitors on the entire Web, Review Sites, and News Sites, as well as Social Media Channels, like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Google Reviews, Youtube, Linkedin, Forums, TripAdvisor, Booking, etc.
Mentionlytics is a powerful social media monitoring tool as it tracks mentions, hashtags, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages, granting organisations access to audience insights and historical data. Companies can discover top influencers while finding potential leads and creating an opportunity for brand growth. With the help of Mentionlytics, a business can protect its online reputation, as the tool is not made only for social media monitoring, but for the broader web as well.
On that same note, it allows jumping into online conversations in real-time, replying to potential customers, and mastering your crisis management response. The app comes with a Social Intelligent Advisor; an AI service capable of deriving actionable insights from social data. This is a unique feature among other social media monitoring tools that provides smarter insights, better social media analytics, and simple suggestions for personalised brand management.
Mentionlytics is ideal for small, medium, and large organisations, but it also supports agencies and individuals. Providing value for money, it is easy to use and offers the possibility of creating different kinds of reports, allowing an organisation to take a step in the right direction.
Simply put, Mentionlytics’ social media monitoring app is designed in a user-friendly way, focusing on generating informative reports. The app supports the monitoring of multiple social platforms and presents data in a single dashboard. The quality and quantity of data make Mentionlytics one of the most powerful tools in the market, counting thousands of satisfied customers all over the world.
The app comes with a social media scheduling feature, which enables you to publish on multiple social media platforms, schedule posts for later, monitor the performance of your posts, and get actionable advice to optimise your brand’s social presence. Last but not least, Mentionlytics supports alerts, so you can receive your mentions instantly in your email.
Mentionlytics features:
Some of the major Mentionlytics features are:
- Social Intelligence Advisor (unique feature)
- Review Monitoring
- Share of Voice
- Customisable report builder
- Top mentioner’s report
- Boolean mentions search
- Social reach
- Full web monitoring
- Competitor monitoring
- Full analytics dashboard with graphs and detailed analysis
- Marketing leads or topics monitoring
- Publisher
- Labeling and assignment of mentions
- Mobile application
- Hootsuite Integration
- Slack Integration
Mentionlytics pricing:
- Basic Plan $49 per month
- Essential Plan $99 per month
- Advanced Plan $199 per month
- Pro Plan $299 per month
- Agency Plan starts at $450 per month
Tool #2: Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a social media monitoring app enabling marketers to access data from several sources. This tool hands over a large amount of data for social media analytics and sentiment analysis, as it provides access to data beyond the same old demographics; analysing positive, negative, and neutral comments.
Brandwatch Consumer Research is a “self-serve application”, which collects data from social media networks to share with companies the information and the means to track specific segments to analyse their brands’ online presence.
The tool’s report analysis includes blogs, news sites, forums, videos, reviews, images, and social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Users can search data by using text and image search, charting, categorisation, sentiment analysis, and other features to receive additional information and completed analysis.
All in all, Brandwatch helps with market research, trend analysis, protecting and monitoring your brand’s online presence, and benchmarking your performance.
Brandwatch features:
- Reports & Dashboards
- Social Analytics
- Platform Reporting
- Monitoring & Listening
- Data Management & Analysis
Brandwatch pricing:
Brandwatch has not provided pricing information for its services. You have to contact the app to obtain current pricing.
Tool #3: BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is the all-in-one content marketing tool, offering you the content research and performance insights you need. The tool provides from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit data, to content analysis, influencers, trending stories, and social media alerts.
By collecting multiple articles and social engagements and integrating them into the search app, BuzzSumo made it easy and simple for businesses to pinpoint industry trends, understand their audience, and monitor their brand. That means they get the insights they need to create competitive, traffic-attracting, and pleasant content, again and again.
The app looks at data-driven research as the secret to creating superior content that drives likes, shares, and top rankings. People behind the app know that being a marketer means your time is valuable, so the tool is built in a way to make comprehensive content research accessible, fast, and easy.
BuzzSumo monitors your competition, brand mentions, and market updates. The alerts ensure you don’t miss necessary events and don’t get squished under the social media avalanche.
BuzzSumo features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Reports & Dashboards
- Social Analytics
- Results analysis
- Monitoring & Listening
- Data Management & Analysis
- Content research
- Influencer finder
BuzzSumo pricing:
- Pro Plan $99 per month
- Plus Plan $179 per month
- Large Plan $299 per month
- Enterprise Plan upon request
Tool #4: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management software that assists companies in brand building. Making stronger connections with your audience, and attracting results business leaders are interested in by incorporating social consistency across organisations are some of the features of this tool.
The tool is suitable for many organisations. With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts across various social networks (e.g Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube), monitor organic and paid social content altogether, keep track of the things your customers discuss, break down silos in the way you collaborate within your business, and collect actionable real-time audience insights from social media to make informed business decisions. You can benefit from the most suited days and times to upload your posts, so you can build awareness, boost engagement, and drive traffic.
The app uses monitoring filters that allow users to do their research based on a keyword or a location. This assists the process of filtering social conversations by using keywords, locations, or hashtags. In addition, Hootsuite is offered in many languages, so you can track and monitor hashtags based on the future endeavours of your competitors across the globe and of course their content on social networks.
Hootsuite features:
The available features of this tool are:
- Automated publishing
- Content management
- Social media channel management
- Social media scheduling
- Brand monitoring
- Customer engagement
- Team collaboration
- Reporting and analytics
Hootsuite pricing:
- Professional Plan €39 per month
- Team Plan €109 per month
- Business Plan €669 per month
- Enterprise Plan Custom Solutions
Tool #5: Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that empowers customers to enhance strategies on social media. Improved relations with clients, streamlined publishing workflows, instantaneous collaboration, and changing data from social media to actionable insights are Sprout Social’s key elements.
Sprout Social’s easy-to-use platform is simple and intuitive but powerful enough to support the largest enterprises. Its all-in-one solution includes social publishing, engagement, analytics, reviews, social commerce, and social listening.
This tool is accompanied by a high ROI and has gained great user adoption because of the social reach measuring. In terms of reports, the customer can have a report on one platform allowing them to discover leading influencers. It helps organisations to understand their audience, uncover current industry trends, and on that account, enrich the marketing campaigns on their social media profiles.
With Sprout Social, organisations can approach wider audiences, while allowing the planning, organising, and content scheduling. The reporting platform of the app allows you to connect with your audience in real-time and you can also utilise the tool to uncover analytics data to make strategic decisions.
Sprout Social features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Social media scheduling & managing
- Reports & Dashboards
- Social Analytics
- Social listening & monitoring
- Data Management & Analysis
- Employee advocacy
Sprout Social pricing:
- Standard Plan $89 per month
- Professional Plan $149 per month
- Advanced Plan $249 per month
Tool #6: TalkWalker
Talkwalker is a Consumer Intelligence Acceleration software designed for companies to attract business influence. It merges a great number of internal and external data points of supply with AI-powered Blue Silk™ technology.
Talkwalker’s AI-powered software absorbs several customer indications to create a complete picture for the consumer; boosting the time it takes to point out any change and adjust to it and giving businesses valuable time to fine-tune strategies and make informed business decisions. Talkwalker provides brands access to actionable consumer intelligence, as well as to online media in real-time.
The tool enables you to discover product mentions, monitor events, and mentions of your brand, and consequently spot trends that are about to come to the surface.
TalkWalker features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Report Customizability
- Data Exporting
- Competitor Analysis
- Follower Analysis
- Post Performance
- Paid Campaign
- Tracking Attribution
- Social Measurement
- Influencer Identification
- Sentiment Analysis
- Social intelligence
- Customer intelligence
- Trend analysis
TalkWalker pricing:
- Basic Plan $9,600 per year
- Corporate On request
- Enterprise On request
Tool #7: Mention
Mention is a social media listening and monitoring software that allows brands and agencies to comprehend audience perception across social media accounts and the web.
By using Mention you can easily monitor what is being said online about your brand or products, get comprehensive analytics about your industry, and measure the impact of your marketing and PR activities. This social media listening tool makes it possible for marketers to pay attention to online conversations by making sure they do not overlook any useful insights or information for their marketing strategy. The app also enables customers to distribute content within their online communities while increasing their followers. Consequently, by operating Mention, you will be aware of the conversations your customers have online, and never let any kind of information slip out of your hands.
The three key elements that best describe the tool are; brand monitoring, social listening, social media scheduling, and publishing. Pin-point conversations of high importance, which means easily monitoring more than many sources across the web daily, together with press articles, review sites as well as news sites, forums, and blogs. The following step is listening and making sense of everything posted across multiple social media platforms. Reveal trends in discourse, filter, and evaluate data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And lastly, come closer with your customers across all social accounts and expand your online presence.
Mention features:
Some of the features of this app are:
- Social Media Management
- Media Channels
- Geographic Coverage
- Reporting
- Brand Monitoring and Social Listening
- Data Management and Analysis
- Social Media Scheduling
Mention pricing:
- Solo Plan $29.00 per month
- Pro Plan $99.00 per month
- ProPlus Plan $199.00
- Company Plan upon request
Tool #8: Awario
Awario is another social media and web monitoring tool, which enables tracking brand mentions, monitoring competition, discovering sales opportunities and influencers, and engaging with online audiences.
Awario allows you to use your brand name as a keyword, discover conversations on a variety of social networks, and join them in real-time. Broadcast your product, service, or content on social media, and the web to approach non-existing customers and stimulate the Word Of Mouth marketing strategy. Information is in every social media corner, so sorting out this information to understand your audience is a vital step in improving your marketing strategy.
Awario helps you track and analyse client mentions, check the sentiment and reach, and create customisable reports on the platform. In addition, you can stay engaged with your audience; by tracking brand mentions, answering their queries in-app, and following up on positive and negative feedback. But besides that, you get to discover a potential clientele while checking out companies similar to yours, and so you turn prospects into leads by being the first to respond to their questions and provide solutions.
Awario features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Social Measurement
- Influencer Identification
- Brand monitoring
- Sentiment Analysis
- Social Reporting
- Social listening
- Social selling
Awario pricing:
- Starter Plan $39 per month
- Pro Plan $119 per month
- Enterprise Plan $399 per month
Tool #9: Keyhole
Keyhole guides marketers and agencies to assess, evolve and report on their impressions on social media. Keyhole’s social listening, influencer tracking, and social media analytics services allow marketers and companies to advance their social media and brand activation and establish their impact both on co-workers and clients. Also, the tool’s dashboard is easy to use and allows you to create and distribute reports right away.
Using Keyhole’s influencers metrics enables you to analyse supporters spreading the word about your hashtags. Filtering influencers derived from geo-location and keywords in their profile bios, as reaching out to them helps increase engagement and your influencer ROI. Categorising influencers according to their exposure and engagement levels they achieve is also possible.
Additionally, the social media analytics dashboard has a word cloud that demonstrates hashtags frequently accompanying the leading one. You can make the most out of it by identifying top hashtags compatible with your campaign and finding windows of opportunity.
In other words, Keyhole is a hashtag analytics tool, which provides customers with efficient social media monitoring to assist with understanding online discussions. The tool holds a platform for analysing the profile of social media followers for a better understanding of their interests.
Keyhole features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Campaign monitoring
- Influencer monitoring
- Brand monitoring
- Event monitoring
- Hashtag tracking
- Social media publishing
Keyhole pricing:
- Basic Plan $49 per month
- Plus Plan $99 per month
- Professional Plan $199 per month
- Enterprise Plan Custom Pricing
Tool #10: Semrush
Semrush is an online visibility management platform, which offers several products, tools, and add-ons, as well as content tools, social media, market research, and data from multiple countries.
Semrush is great for keyword research, as you can explore all the keywords that will allow you to target and bring traffic to your site. You can fully uncover both organic and advertising keyword value, to uncover the keyword gap between you and your competitors and explore all the new opportunities presented in front of you for launching efficient SEO campaigns.
The platform provides valuable customer insights, by monitoring what your audience is saying about your brand across the web. This also works for your competition, as you can compare your brand’s performance against theirs.
Semrush features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Local Search Optimization
- SEO Auditing & Monitoring
- SEO Content & Rankings
- SEO Reporting
- Keyword research
- Competitor monitoring
- Market analysis
Semrush pricing:
- Pro Plan $119.95 per month
- Guru Plan $229.95 per month
- Business $449.95 per month
Tool #11: Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free-of-charge notification tool by Google, that drops email alerts to subscribers, to sum up, the activity around search terms. Users can set daily, weekly, or monthly notifications.
The service is beneficial for an e-commerce business, as it generates information about the business, more precisely whenever your brand’s name is mentioned and information about the product every time someone leaves a comment about your current or new products or services. You can also monitor and organise mentions of company executives, as it affects the reputation of the organisation.
Simultaneously, using alerts helps you stay on top of your customers’ activities while keeping an eye on your competitors, and discovering influencers. Staying up to date with everything related to your industry is the most efficient way to evolve your niche.
P.S Google Alerts can easily be overwhelmed with irrelevant information if the search criteria are too extensive, so don’t overlook the methods that will help you filter out the noise from your search results, for example, specific words, phrases, negative keywords, and specific site searching.
Google Alerts features:
Some of the features of this tool are:
- Alerts
- Web monitoring
- Competitor monitoring
- Tracking mentions
- Finding influencers
Google Alerts pricing:
It is a free tool.
Now Over to You
The value of brand monitoring lies in identifying how people feel about your business. This information helps you make strategic marketing decisions and build campaigns your followers will love. Spotting negative comments and addressing them immediately gives you control of the way others perceive your brand’s image and so your online presence. The more you decide to monitor, the more you will stay up to date about your industry, and how your brand deals with competition.
Listening to your audience and everything they have to say is the benchmark to protecting your brand reputation and empowering your brand awareness.
Still, wondering about brand monitoring tools and how they protect your reputation? Well, all you have to do is book a live demo with Mentionlytics, and all the potential of our tool will be revealed to you. All the brand monitoring solutions you need are one click away!
Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/brand-monitoring-tools