In the case of businesses, you want to know genuine organic mentions of your brand – both positive and negative. This is particularly important when somebody complains about your brand online. You can’t remedy a problem if you don’t know of its existence. Often all it takes to make somebody happy is a reply, where you recognize his or her concern. The problem with social media is that people are now accustomed to near instantaneous reply. For you to react with speed, you first need to know when you have a brand mention. A key part of social media management is keeping people happy. Influencers also need to play the same game. They rule their niche because people trust them and believe in their authenticity. If the sentiment changes and people begin to doubt an influencer’s sincerity, it is vital the influencer learns of this as quickly as possible. Some of the tools we cover focus on social media listening, while others are more into social media monitoring. Although people often use the terms interchangeably, there is a subtle difference. Social monitoring is the first step in a social listening strategy. A firm monitors all mentions of its name online, particularly on social media. Once you have discovered social mentions, you can then go a stage further and analyze what the mentions mean. You look for patterns and trends and discover the influencers who already organically promote your product. Brands and influencers can use a combination of the following tools to help them discover all brand mentions and to monitor the sentiment on their social media accounts.
Social Media Monitoring Tools:
Social Network Search Engines and Analytics
Of course, the cheapest way to monitor your brand mentions in social media is to use each social network’s inbuilt native search or analytics tools. This can be more time-consuming than the other paid methods, however. They may be of value for individuals or small brands that are just starting the process. Brandwatch is used by large companies such as Walmart, Unilever, Microsoft, IKEA, and L’Oréal. It splits its product uses into:
Brand management Content strategy Competitor analysis Customer experience Influencer marketing Crisis management
In terms of brand management, Brandwatch allows you to track your brand health. It helps you know when people are talking about your company. It can tell you when your brands, products, and logos are shared across millions of online sources. You can monitor key publications, regions, and influencers, and Identify emerging opportunities and challenges, even when your brand is not mentioned directly. Social listening is a core part of their software. You can use it to keep track of your chosen keywords from social media and the web via one dashboard helping you to save loads of time. After setting up which keywords you want to monitor, Sendible will start to collect mentions of your brand in its central dashboard. What’s more, each mention will be color-coded. This way, it becomes much easier to distinguish the good from the bad. Sadly, they no longer offer review sites monitoring. Though, if that’s a key feature, you can always check out a tool like Reputology or Sprout Social (both also included in this list). They offer three plans, ranging from Individual (at $49/month) to Enterprise (at $299/month). Each plan adds additional users, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of mentions per month. The speed of tracking also improves with each plan. When you set up your Brand24 account, you create a Project. This is the social identity for whom you intend to monitor mentions and social activity. On higher plans, you can follow more than one Project. Brans24 is more than just a mere social media listening tool, however. It provides you with comprehensive data and analysis. It helps paint a thorough picture of how the world perceives your brand. It analyzes online, social, print and TV/radio content in one. It incorporates image recognition technology to track 30,000 brand images. Not only can you monitor results in real-time, but you can also access more than two years of historic data. Talkwalker provides the tools to undertake social listening for your brand over 10 social networks. It goes further than that, however, and monitors discussion on online news sites, blogs, forums, and even offline databases. In total, it monitors 150 million websites. At its most basic, YouScan is a listening tool, able to scan social media and the rest of the web for brand mentions, and then analyse those mentions for its larger social impact. The real selling point of YouScan, however, is its image recognition capabilities, which allows users to get decidedly specific in their visual searches. Trusted by big brands like Lufthansa, the Premier League, and National Geographic, it offers a free trial and three subscription plans. Though, to take advantage of its brand monitoring feature, you’ll need to sign up for its Advanced of Enterprise plan. Buzzsumo allows you to set up your alerts to come via email or RSS. It also allows you to create a personalized dashboard to monitor all of your alerts. As a business, you may opt to receive your alerts by daily alert, although real-time alerts are probably more practical when dealing with dissatisfied customers. In short, you can use it to access all your direct and indirect brand mentions and hashtags in one intuitive dashboard. This way you can interact with your audience in real time. One feature that deserves special mention is its volume predictions feature that tells you if a post about your brand could likely go viral. All in all, it offers impressive functionality and its granular machine-learning-driven brand monitoring will help you to uncover the overall sentiment behind your brand. You can set up email notifications so that you can receive daily summary of brand mentions conveniently in your inbox. If there’s a significant number of mentions, you can sort it by reach. This way you’ll see the conversations that will likely have the biggest impact first helping you to prioritize your tasks for the day. One of its useful features that stand is its powerful analytics. With this valuable info right at your fingertips, you can track how brand mentions and their collective reach grow. It also offers sentiment analysis that you can use to categorize mentions as neutral, positive, or negative. Considering that its pricing starts at only $24 per month when billed annually, it’s one of the most cost-effective solutions for brand monitoring. Alternatively, you can set up email notifications so that you can track new mentions via your inbox. One of the useful features of using email alerts is that you’ll get notified right away and you can also set it up so that multiple recipients receive the same notification. While it does offer a free plan, for brand monitoring you’ll need to sign up for one of its paid plans. Pricing starts at about €3.49 per month, meaning that it’s still one of the most affordable options. It’s especially useful if you want to track mentions of your brand on Instagram or Twitter as it can also identify negative hashtags used in connection with your brand. You can use it to get the most crucial mentions with regards to sentiment, engagement, and reach. Another key feature that deserves special mention is that it will help you to uncover trolls that are just out to ruin your name. What’s more, it will offer recommendations for how you can tackle this problem. Overall, it’s a great app for small to medium-sized businesses. The industries that it specifically focuses on are agencies, non-profits, and financial institutions. It offers three tiers of service, with the feature list growing alongside the price. The top tier plan (giving ten users, ten projects, 50 keywords, 500,000 instant mentions, 50,000 historical mentions up to five years old) is still affordable and within reach of just about any sized business. BrandMentions keeps its “ears” wide open for brand mentions. It “listens” to every major social media platform, along with many non-social websites, including review sites, news sites, and blogs. If it finds a mention of one of the company’s clients, it will index it into the system, and notify the client for quick action (if needed). BrandMentions offers ways to save, organize, and report on the mentions it finds, effectively turning them into data points available for ongoing analysis and business intelligence. The business intelligence you’ll get from it will pay for itself in no time. You can monitor local media coverage in real-time from thousands of sources across print, broadcast, online, social and licensed content behind the paywall from the Copyright Agency. Meltwater also provides full-text premium content from a network of global publishers including the Associated Press, to social channels such as WeChat and Weibo. Meltwater also provides social media management services, allowing you to manage your social channels in one place. You can efficiently manage workflow, easily schedule content, join conversations, respond to customers, and report on the social media insights that matter. You can also use Meltwater to discover online conversations, community discussions, and trending topics to build influence and connect with your audience. Meltwater lets you use keyword searches to find the right journalists and social influencers. The $49 / month Solo Plan is ideal for a single user wishing to monitor mentions of their brand. This plan allows two basic alerts and records up to 5,000 mentions per month. The difference between an alert and a mention is that an alert is the keywords you have Mention crawl the web in search of, for example, it could be your brand’s name. Each time the tool finds a reference to that alert, it creates a Mention. Every time it finds a Mention, it will send you either a customizable push notification or an email notification, depending on your settings. The next level, designed for small businesses wishing to monitor their brand and competitors, is the $99/month Pro Plan. This increases your allowances to 5 basic alerts, 10,000 Mentions, and 10 users. In addition, at this tier, you gain access to a dashboard, sentiment analysis, and an influencer’s dashboard. If your needs are higher (or your business larger) then you will have to talk with Mention about their Company Plan, where you can negotiate your requirements, and gain additional features. One great feature of Mention is that it discovers mentions of your brand in Facebook conversations, which can be a valuable way of discovering disgruntled customers. Mention has also developed an API, so you can incorporate it into your website. It can be a much quicker way to check and manipulate your Twitter account than in Twitter itself. You can set up multiple columns to show relevant combinations of tweets for multiple Twitter accounts. While most people choose to pick columns like Home, Notifications, or Messages, you have many more options. This includes setting up a column for @mentions – either on a specific account or across accounts. You can set up multiple columns to monitor a wide range of keywords if that is of use to you. You can respond directly to tweets from within TweetDeck. If you use your brand name as the key term, Socialmention.net helps you discover references to your brand. Socialmention.net monitors more than 100 social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. It is a free tool and offers an API for developers who want to interact with the Social Mention site programmatically. Socialmention.net does more than just tell you when your keyword/brand is mentioned though. It includes sentiment analysis, including whether each mention is positive, neutral, or negative. It gives percentage scores for each term, relating to strength, passion, and reach, as well as a sentiment ratio – positive: negative. Socialmention.net also gives you the option of carrying out an Advanced Search, helping you to better refine your term, and the sources for your results. Aa well as providing a point-in-time social media search, you can sign up for a daily social media alert, to help you better monitor your brand’s mentions and sentiment. Boardreader is ideal for searching for a specific term, your brand for instance, across a range of forums and digital places. Like Social Mention, Boardreader has an extremely simple interface. All it presents you with is a search box and a button to click on. You can enter your brand into the search box and generate a list of mentions of the term on a range of forums over the last two years. It will then come up with a list, potentially very large, of mentions, beginning with your most recent mention. It provides you with a range of search option, including the type of post, date range, language, domain (if you want to link your search to a specific domain), way to sort, and the number of results per page. You can also take an Advanced Search if you want more granular data. Another very useful feature is that you can select to graph mentions of your term. This makes it clear if there are any patterns or any particular days when interest in the phrase spiked. You can use it dig deeply into your Twitter analytics. You can search Twitter bios, connect with influencers or fans, and break them down by location, authority, number of followers etc. It gives each Twitter user a social rank, for instance, both Justin Bieber and Barack Obama have social authority scores of 96, now overtaken by Donald Trump with Social Authority of 100. However, search is not restricted to particular accounts. You can search for a keyword term (your brand, for instance), and Followerwonk will come up with a list of all the Twitter accounts with that term in their bios. Their intuitive platform makes it easy to track and breakdown conversations about your brand and relevant topics. It also offers actionable data and user-friendly reports that list all the key info like audience demographics and consumer attitudes. A useful feature that deserves special mention is the review management. This feature (which is included in all its plans) lets you keep track of and respond to reviews across a number of sites including Facebook, Yelp, Glassdoor, and Google My Business. While Sprout Social can be used by brands of all sizes, it’s not the cheapest tool on this list (pricing starts at $249 per month). So, all things considered, they’re better suited for larger businesses with more heavy-duty needs. With the help of their powerful social media monitoring tools, brands can get a 360-degree view of conversations around their brand and keep track of trends that will help them to understand their brand, industry, and target audience in full context. You can also take it one step further and analyze the brand sentiment faster using AI. Armed with this insight, your marketing team is better equipped to identify where campaigns need to be changed to get better results. While they offer a lot of features, when it comes to their pricing, there’s not a lot of choice. In fact, if you want access to their social media listening features, you’ll need to sign up for the complete Emplifi solution and pricing is available only if you request a consultation. However, one of the useful features of Hootsuite is that you can add a wide range of streams to each social network data dashboard. As well as obvious columns, such as Home, Timeline, Lists, and Scheduled (depending on the social network) you can create streams based on filters. This is particularly useful with Twitter, where you can set up a stream based on searches for particular keywords – your company name or custom hashtag, for instance. For some of the other networks, such as Facebook, the easiest way to monitor your brand name is to set up a stream filtered by Mentions. Because Hootsuite can cover so many social channels, it helps you monitor mentions across your full range of social networks. Twitter, for instance, has a quite advanced search tool. You can search for keywords placed anywhere in a Twitter bio or in the tweets themselves. You can make your search even more powerful by using Boolean search tools, such as AND and OR, as well as putting terms in quotes when searching for a specific word sequence. You can also search for hashtags, and @ terms.
