Be it on social media or throughout the entire web; your audience can be anywhere, and identifying what they really need is essential for growth. The best way to achieve this is to stay honest, observe their opinion, and be attentive towards them. Your customers’ constructive feedback is necessary to make things better for your business. Once you start interacting with your customers and listen to them, you’re opening avenues of good and positive perception of your business. This, in turn, will potentially help you be regarded as a user-centric brand. Keeping that in mind, I’ve compiled this list of brand monitoring tools for your brand to take the growth a notch higher. If that sounds interesting, let’s jump straight into it. 😉
SproutSocial
Another great tool for social listening; SproutSocial helps you understand your audience to the deepest roots. You can utilize industry, brand, and competitive insights to find out relevant topics and better understand user sentiments. You can gather insights and use them not only on social media but also on other areas of development, such as customer care, new products, and overall marketing. There are a lot more features to it, and you can try them all using the free trial.
BrandMentions
As the name suggests, BrandMentions allows you to skim through the entire web and find relevant mentions. It is a great indicator of finding customers and promoting products in the right places. Not only that, but you can also build relations in the process and enjoy a larger brand exposure. You can find out the conversations that are brewing about your brand or products, and even instantly identify the tone in which they’re conversing. This is essential in understanding the emotions behind the mention. Since competitor analysis is such an important aspect of marketing, BrandMentions lets you spy on your competitors and analyze the top players in your niche. You can choose to research and get insights on any topic too. Lastly, you’ll be getting real-time notifications regarding the latest links and mentions directly to your inbox.
Awario
Awario hits right at the target by making brand monitoring real quick and efficient. You can enter the keywords for Awario to scramble the web. This will help you in tracking the mentions and reacting just in time. Subsequently, you can use the built-in sentiment analysis to segregate the source of the positive and negative comments. Its analytics further help you to track the platforms, influencing factors, change in the market reaction, etc. You can find posts asking for recommendations or ditching competitors so that you can pitch yours right away. With the Boolean search, you can tailor set the search for mentions based on a variety of factors like the country, platform, etc. In addition, Awario lets you export data-rich white-label reports with just a click. Finally, you can use Awario from desktop, mobile, or tablet to never miss an update.
Mentionlytics
Dedicated for social media platforms, Mentionlytics allows you to access mention insights, look for influencers, and acquire leads. It also helps you prevent a reputation crisis by jumping into customers’ issues and solving them at an early stage. You can choose to keep a watch on your competitors by simply entering their brand keyword, and you’ll be presented with all their mentions across the platforms. The feature that I am most fascinated by is sentiment analysis. It can skim through all the mentions and tell you whether or not the conversation held a positive sentiment while writing it. On top of all that, you can also integrate Mentionlytics with Trello and HootSuite.
Google Alerts
There’s no way I’d be leaving out the good old and reliable Google Alerts from this list. This company is known for its quality services, and this is definitely one of them. Also, the simplicity of this tool is worth talking about. No fancy design or extra unwanted features; it does what is actually required. You can create alerts for all purposes, be it for your brand or just about anything. A few weeks back, I had created an alert for my website’s domain to check if it’s being linked to from other sites, and this tool did the work wonderfully by notifying me via email for every backlink. Similar to this, you can use Google Alerts for your benefit and stay notified of anything related to your interest.
Brand24
Brand24 has a much wider reach, covering social platforms, news portals, blogs, forums, and more. It is robust and 100% GDPR compliant. Their mentions from Facebook and Instagram are collected from the official Facebook API, and this speaks volumes. You can expect these monitoring data from Brand24:
Number of mentionsThe mood of the mentionsTypes and number of interactionsMost active Twitter mention areasThe context behind the mentionInfluencers from your niche
The great thing is, this solution lets you compare your performance with your competitors and come up with better tactics.
Boardreader
If your main focus is on message boards and forums, then Boardreader might be what you’re looking for. This tool crawls and finds discussion panels to show what people are saying about you and your brand (or just about any keyword you put in). It’s very simple in nature but quite useful because, more often than not, people carry out genuine conversations in forums and comment sections. Trying to find those manually is an unimaginable task, so you’d definitely want to use this tool for that.
Hootsuite
Best known as a social media management tool, Hootsuite also has a brand monitoring feature that works brilliantly. You can search for conversations by keywords, hashtags, or locations, that too, in multiple languages. Once you find the appropriate conversations, you can quickly respond to them either by yourself or assign them to your team members. You can also add certain apps to further enhance your monitoring. Hootsuite is one of the most popular solutions out there, so you can hardly go wrong with them.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch can pull out data from 100 million sources and over 1.3 trillion individual posts. That’s massive, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s used by companies like Samsung, BBC, and Walmart. They have an advanced AI technology called “Iris” that does most of the incredible work in this tool. You know a service is great when the technical aspects are partially controlled by AI. Things are bound to go most of the time smoothly. You can quickly and easily add new data sources to fetch information from areas that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It has a flexible UI and a smart support team to fall back on at any given time. You can get started by filling out the form on the page.
Mention
Rated 4.5/5 stars on G2 Crowd, Mention can help you, monitor, analyze, and work upon over 1 billion sources on the web. You can discover relevant insights and share them with your team members so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. Apart from that, Mention allows you to:
Analyze your competitionView brand perception based on conversationsEasily understand and listen to your audienceManage and schedule social content
You can try out their entire suite at no cost for a start using the free trial.
Falcon
You can track trends and have a better idea of your brand perception with Falcon. It allows you to look through 2.7 million sources and even narrow it down with variables like keywords, exclusions, and word combinations. All in all, this tool lets you:
Spot trendsMonitor your brandTrack custom queriesSort, filter, and view your collected dataIdentify influencers who’re engaging with your brand topicsAnalyze sentimentsCreate custom audiences
Falcon is available in several languages, including Spanish, German, and Mandarin.
Conclusion
It’s important to know what your audience is up to in order to serve them better. Without brand monitoring, it’s equivalent to throwing arrows blindfolded. I hope the above tools will help you in that regard and potentially grow your business.