Brand reputation in a world that develops according to online interactions is more insecure than ever. One can become bold about what they experience, competitive firms come up with new and better versions of products day by day, and a single post from an influencer can sway opinions. In such a scenario, a business needs to outsmart everything, and that’s where brand sentiment comes into play.
These tools allow companies to monitor and analyze brand mentions in various online places. We shall look at the top 12 brand monitoring tools to help a business protect and enhance its brand image.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand sentiment means following up on any mention or reference to a brand, product, service, or related keywords from across the internet. This will range from social media, news articles, blogs, forums, websites, reviews, and podcasts. The main reason for carrying out online reputation management is knowing exactly what people say concerning a brand and making informed decisions on how to manage public perception, respond to customers’ questions, or identify possible crises.
ORM can be as simple as tracking only mentions of your brand name or even as complex as sentiment analysis, which will inform if those mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. Companies could therefore be constantly monitoring conversations online and proactively managing the reputation of their brands while extricating valuable insights that increase customer satisfaction and engagement.
Benefits of Brand Monitoring Tools
It offers some benefits: they help improve the improvement of marketing strategies and customer relationships as well as improve the health of the brand. These are some of the main advantages:
1.Real-time Alerts
Brand sentiment tool enables an organization to receive notifications when its brand is mentioned online. The company can respond promptly to both positive and negative mentions, prevent a missed opportunity, and deal with threats.
2. Crisis Management
Because a crisis escalates very quickly, monitoring tools can pick the situation well before it reaches full-blown crisis status and business can act very fast-in the case of a product recall-a customer complaint, or negative press-to mitigate the damage.
3. Brand Analyzing
All brand mentions can be analyzed in order to find insights of the customer. Tracking conversations shows common issues or possible opportunities that may shape the product and services of a business or trends that may emerge in the future.
4. Competitor Analysis
Brand monitoring tools also track online presence of competitors for businesses. This can further be used to track what is being said about their competitors; seek spaces in the market; learn about relative strengths and weaknesses of competitors, and make adjustments accordingly.
Key Features of Brand Monitoring Tools
For online reputation management tool selection, the business will have to find one that meets requirements through provision of a number of features in order to allow easy tracking and analysis of mentions of a brand in multiple platforms. Among the most prominent features of good brand monitoring tools is:
1. Keyword Monitoring
Probably the most common feature of online reputation management tools is keywords entry, which can include brand name and product names, competitors, and also the specific terms present in the industry. The software will track who used those keywords around the web and report on them.
2. Sentiment Analysis
AI and ML measure the emotions conveyed through online mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. This allows businesses to easily measure public opinions and react in time.
3. Social Media Monitoring
Since most communication now is by means of social media, most online reputation management tools currently combine social media tracking. They can track mentions across such popular channels as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
4. Competitor Monitoring
Many brand monitoring tools track competitor mentions to get updated with the competition. This feature will depict the competitor and what is being said that could help businesses find opportunities in the marketplace.
5. In-Depth Reporting
Most of the tools give detailed reporting with trends over time, sentiment breakdowns, geographical insights, and much more. The report building can further be used for building data-driven business decisions and for fine-tuning marketing strategies.
Top 12 Brand Monitoring Tools
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most comprehensive social media monitoring platforms in the market today. It allows businesses to monitor all sorts of social media channels from a unified dashboard. The platform scores high in tracking real-time brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords across different social networks. It consists of analytics that enable users to produce detailed reports on brand performance and engagement metrics.
Hootsuite’s features allow team members to work together towards improving the efficiency of social media monitoring and response tasks. Lastly, it has scheduling facility and content curation. It is, therefore, a one-stop-shop for social media management and monitoring.
Key Features:
- Multi-channel real-time social media monitoring
- Custom streams of mentions, hashtags, keywords tracking
- Advanced analytics and reporting facilities
- Tools for collaboration with workflow management with teams
Best For:
- Medium to large businesses with such requirements of comprehensive social media management and monitoring.
Pricing:
| Professional | $49/month |
| Team | $129/month |
| Business | $739/month |
| Enterprise | Custom Pricing |
Website:
www.hootsuite.com
2. BuzzSumo
It also happens to be an excellent content and social media monitoring tool for businesses looking to find the trending content and monitor brand mentions across the web. Its specialty is research and competitive analysis to help clients identify the most shared content in their particular industry. Among other things, it gives insight into content performance metrics like social shares, backlinks, and engagement.
One can also track brand mentions, competitor analysis, and identify key influencers in a particular area. A feature for crisis management and new-mention alerts is also equipped to this tool, which can be gold dust for content strategists and marketers.
Key Features:
- Content discovery and analysis
- Brand and competitor monitoring
- Identification and tracking of influencers
- Real-time content alerts
- Backlink monitoring
- Historical content analysis
Best For:
- Content marketers, PR professionals, and digital marketing agencies
Pricing:
| Basic | $99/month |
| Plus | $179/month |
| Large | $299/month |
| Enterprise | Quote based |
Website:
www.buzzsumo.com
3. Semrush
Semrush is a full-scale digital marketing suite that has robust brand monitoring capabilities along with its other SEO and marketing tools. The platform has an all-inclusive brand monitoring tool that tracks mentions on news sites, blogs, forums, and social media.
It does provide sentiment analysis and gives out potential threats or opportunities regarding one’s reputation. In a bigger picture, Semrush becomes useful for brands that wish to monitor not only the brand presence but also digital marketing in general because of its connectivity with the SEO and competitive analysis tools. The website shines when providing detailed analytics and competitive intelligence. It aids businesses in figuring out the market position as well as the brand’s perception.
Key Features:
- Integrated SEO and marketing
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- Alert system for new mentions
- Content scheduling and publishing
- Integration with over 150+ applications
Best For:
- Digital marketing professionals and businesses that will need an integrated marketing and monitoring solution.
Pricing:
| Pro | $119.95/month |
| Guru | $229.95/month |
| Business | $449.95/month |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing |
Website:
www.semrush.com
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social integrates very advanced ORM capabilities with a complete social media management system. On one hand, this offers very sophisticated listening tools that will track the conversation across multiple social networks and even across the web. Its Smart Inbox function lets it aggregate every type of social message and mention in a single stream for easier monitoring and response.
Analytics capabilities from Sprout Social provide tremendous insights into brand performance and audience engagement. It is good at team collaboration, making it an excellent choice for organizations that have many team members working with ORM and social media management. It has a reporting and scheduling feature, which automates the workflow of social media in its totality.
Key Features:
- Smart Inbox helps in the uniform management of messages.
- Advanced social listening
- Team collaboration
- Automatic scheduling and publishing
- Custom reporting and analytics
- Capabilities of integration with CRM
Best For:
- Integrated social media monitoring solution for medium or large companies
Pricing:
| Standard | $99 per user per month |
| Professional | $169 per user per month |
| Advanced | $279 per user per month |
| Enterprise | Price available by quote |
Website:
www.sproutsocial.com
5. Brand24
Brand24 is an independent media monitoring tool that specializes in finding and analyzing real-time mentions on the basis of brand. The actual use of advanced algorithms for finding and analyzing mentions on social media, news sites, blogs, and forums implements the platform. Detailed sentiment analysis is provided, and it helps you indicate what trending topics are related to your brand. Influence score helps determine, in actuality, the potential reach and impact for various mentions.
It is great for the immediate alerts of mentions that require speedy responses to potentials crises and opportunities. It offers a volume chart that analyzes the patterns of mentions and identifies the points of peaks in the conversations that flow concerning the brand.
Key Features:
- Live mentions
- Sentiment score
- Volume of conversations
- Calculating Influence Score
- PDF and infographic report
- An accessory option for the mobile app
Best For:
- Small and medium-sized business will appreciate the all-around monitoring of their brands
Pricing:
| Personal | $49/month |
| Team | $99/month |
| Pro | $199/month |
| Enterprise | Price at quote |
Website:
www.brand24.com
6. Ahrefs
Best known for its advanced SEO tool, Ahrefs provides the resource of brand sentiment through a mention tracker. Ahrefs will do a fantastic job tracking backlinks and web mentions on millions of websites. It produces copious information about brand mentions, including source, authority, and context. One of its unique features involves the capacity to track both linked and unlinked mentions, which helps businesses identify link-building opportunities.
The database is deep and refreshed constantly to ensure users receive updates about current brand mentions in real-time, as there are mentions coming in on a daily basis. This is connected with SEO metrics that add more context about value and impact that each mention holds.
Key Features:
- About tracking and monitoring backlinks
- Content explorer tracker
- Competitive analysis tools
- Hookup of SEO metrics
- Link opportunity discovery
- Access to historical data
Best for:
- Companies and SEO professionals specialized in more detailed link building and web presence
Pricing:
| Lite | $99/month |
| Standard | $199/month |
| Advanced | $399/month |
| Enterprise | $999/month |
Website:
www.ahrefs.com
7. Sendible
Sendible is an all-in-one social media and ORM solution for agencies and multi-brand businesses. Customers are able to personalize dashboards and view multiple brands and track them simultaneously. Advanced schedulers along with content recommendations are included in its monitoring capability.
Smart Queues of the tool maintain constant monitoring and engagement irrespective of the time difference across different time zones. Detailed performance and social media impact is reported.
Key Features:
- Multi-brand monitoring
- Custom dashboards
- Smart Queue scheduling
- Content suggestion engine
- Team collaboration tools
- White-label reporting
Best For:
- Marketing agencies and businesses managing multiple brands
Pricing:
| Creator | $29/month |
| Traction | $89/month |
| Scale | $199/month |
| Expansion | $399/month |
Website:
www.sendible.com
8. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free brand monitoring tool that sends an email notification for any new web mention related to specified keywords or brands. Although the design is simple, it uses the powers of Google’s search feature to track mentions on websites, news articles, and blogs. The tool allows users to change alert frequency along with sources to get a better result. It can be used for the purpose of basic Online reputation management.
Google Alerts can monitor multiple keywords and phrases at one time, issuing reports consolidated according to the user’s preferences. This tool is good for companies just entering into brand monitoring or as an add-on to highly exhaustive solutions.
Key Features:
- New mentions can be received by email
- Alert frequency may be set
- Source types can be filtered
- Language and region can be selected
- An RSS feed may be included
- Easy to set up
Best For:
- Small Businesses and individuals who have simple requirements for Online reputation management
Pricing:
Free
Website:
www.google.com/alerts
9. Awario
Awario is social listening and monitoring of your brands. The good thing here is it monitors the real-time scrutiny of social media, news sites, and the web. It gives you full coverage of all brand mentions with advanced filtering capabilities as well as boolean search options. Of course, it’s different if the competition goes to stronger sentiment analysis and competitive intelligence; that is why businesses can monitor this brand along with its competitors.
The reach metric of Awario allows a user to measure the possible audience in each mention and provides analytics reports on the dynamics of mentions and their sources. The system also includes features aimed at influencer discovery and lead generation.
Key Features:
- Boolean search
- Sentiment analysis
- Tracking competitors
- Generating leads
- Share of voice analysis
- Access to a history
Best For:
- The enterprises need detailed social listening and competitive analysis.
Pricing:
| Starter | $39 |
| Pro | $119 |
| Enterprise | $399 |
| Custom | Negotiable |
Website:
www.awario.com
10. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is the enterprise level social listening and analytics solution. It is the total suite for monitoring a brand across all of the talkers of the spectrum for social. Using AI-powered analysis, this solution tracks mentions across social media, news, blogs, and TV/radio mentions. The advanced image recognition technology can detect brand logos and visual mentions. Talkwalker helps penetrate the length, breadth, and depth of brand health, campaign performance, and market trends through its sophisticated analytics.
The site has crisis management ability through real-time alerts and has high coverage in multi-channel coverage. It is included with the IQ Apps feature, which gives industry-specific insights, as well as automated reporting.
Key Features:
- AI-powered social listening
- Image recognition
- Crisis management
- Competitive intelligence
- Custom scoring
- Advanced analytics
Best for:
- Large enterprises and global brands who require high-level monitoring
Pricing:
| Basic | Custom Pricing |
| Corporate | Custom Pricing |
| Enterprise | Custom Pricing |
Website: www.talkwalker.com
11. Keyhole
Keyhole primarily deals with real-time social media monitoring and analytics in relation to hashtag tracking and campaign measurement. It gives clients more information than the brand mentions across platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Historical data analysis and predictive analytics help optimize the social media strategy of the brand.
The sentiment analysis helps understand the perception of the brand, and its influencer identification features come into use for partnership opportunities. Also, tracks the detection and reach metrics of viral posts.
Key Features:
- Tracking hashtags
- Campaign analytics
- Identification of Influencer
- Sentiment analysis
- Automatic reporting
- Competitor analysis
Best For:
- The tool is best for marketing persons with social media analytic obsession and campaign tracking concerns.
Pricing:
| Personal | $49/month |
| Team | $99/month |
| Corporate | $399/month |
| Enterprise | available on custom quote |
Website: keyhole.co
12. Mention
Mention is the tool that records all mentions in real-time across social media, news sites, forums, blogs, and the web. In fact, you can get instant notifications for the most critical mentions using this tool. The tool is also armed with advanced Boolean search capabilities in monitoring, which can help filter out irrelevant results while keeping track of detailed queries.
Competitive analysis is also within the feature set of Mention, a service through which one can benchmark business performance against competitors and track industry trends.
Key Features:
- Multi-channel monitoring
- Boolean search
- Sentiment Analysis
- Competitive tracking
- Custom alert and reporting
- Social media publishing platform
Best For:
- Small, medium, and large businesses seeking an all-in-one brand monitoring with competitive analytics
Pricing :
| Solo | $29/month |
| Pro | $99/month |
| ProPlus | $199/month |
| Company | Custom Pricing |
Website
www.mention.com
How to Choose the Best Brand Monitoring Tools
Here is a step-by-step process that will guide you through what might best suit your business needs.
1. Identify Your Brand Monitoring Goals
Define your needs before you start comparing and evaluating online reputation management tools. Do you want to track how the customers feel about the product, measure brand awareness, see your competitors, or even spot potential crises early? Knowing the reasons will help you narrow the scope of the tools which offer features you need.
2. Sentiment Analysis
Most of the brand tracking tools monitor mentions across massive social networking platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the website for LinkedIn also. Expect that the tool is also able to offer sentiment analysis based on the type of positive, negative or neutral posting or commenting made
3. Consider the User Interface and Integration
The one you choose should also be intuitive enough so that your team learns to use it easily, and it should also integrate well with other tools that your business is using, be it a CRM system, marketing software, or any social media management platform.
4. Scalability and Customization
As your business grows, so will your needs for brand monitoring. You will need a growing tool that lets you personalize the alerts, the reports, and even the tracking.
5. Support and Customer Service
If you encounter bugs in your interaction with the software, a good piece of customer support is vital. Evaluate whether an application supports through a live chat or email or even comprises a knowledge base and tutorials.
6. Budget and Pricing
Most products are available in a wide range of price points-from entirely free basic plans to subscription only, with premium features. Determine what your budget is and what value you get for each tool relative to its price. Most services will offer some sort of free trial or trial period, so try making use of this to test whether the tool meets your needs before committing.
Conclusion
Of course, the best brand monitoring tool is that which addresses specific requirements and meets certain criteria of your business goals and budget. There is the need to protect one’s reputation by tracking his competitors, customer sentiments about his brand, and many more. The tool chosen could give the needed insights to make the right and informed decisions. Some of the necessary features to be included are real-time alerts, social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, and integration capabilities with other tools for the platform to be an asset.
FAQs
1. What is brand monitoring?
Online reputation management means tracking and reviewing online mentions of your brand, products, or services in order to gain an understanding of the public’s thoughts about your brand or products and protect your reputation.
2. Can I use online reputation management tools to monitor my brand on social media?
You can. Most online reputation management tools monitor mentions of your brand on social media, be it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
3. Is there a free version of brand monitoring?
Yes, even some tools provide a free edition with basic features
4. How frequent do I need to check brand mention?
You would want to keep checking for your brand, as frequently as you can. However, this depends on when you are going to launch a new product.
