The best brand monitoring tools for your business
Keeping track of what people are saying about your brand and what they are talking about in your industry is an essential part of running a business.
Whether you sell products or services, brand monitoring can help your business.
Nowadays, people use so many channels to talk about different things (including your brand) that keeping on top of them is vital for your success. Understanding how people feel about your brand can help your business grow.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Brand monitoring vs. social monitoring
- Benefits of brand monitoring and social monitoring
- What to monitor to find influencers and affiliates for your brand
- The best brand monitoring tools
These include:
These include:
- Keyhole
- Sendible
- Hootsuite
- sproutsocial
At a glance: Best free brand monitoring and social listening tools
At a glance: Best brand monitoring and social listening tools with free trials
Brand monitoring vs. social monitoring
People often mistake brand monitoring and social monitoring for the same thing. While there is overlap, they are slightly different.
Brand monitoring is broader than social monitoring. Simply put, it’s the process of tracking all of your mentions, and it is not limited to social media. You can find out when someone mentions your brand on multiple sources, including social media, news sites, and blogs. It can help you to keep on top of industry trends.
Brand social monitoring is the same, but you exclusively monitor social media and nothing else.
Benefits of brand monitoring and social monitoring
There are several benefits to doing this, including:
- Finding influencers and other potential affiliates
- Improving marketing impact
- Customer-focused and customer-centric products and services
- Market research
- Better customer support and retention
- Increase sales and retain customers
- Monitor overall brand performance
Finding influencers and other partners to work with
Brand monitoring is an excellent tool for finding influencers and other partners, including affiliates for your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Why? Because these influencers have brand affinity - they are connected to your brand and are already mentioning you in their feeds. These partnerships can be incredibly beneficial because they can help you drive revenue to your business, create targeted ads that resonate with their audience, and create brand awareness.
Top tip: You can also track your campaign impact before and after an influencer campaign by monitoring your brand mentions.
Creating more marketing impact
The more information you have about your customers, the more impactful your marketing can be. Brand monitoring can help you glean the information you need - for example - you can see what people like about your brand and what they don’t like, discover overall brand sentiment, and get demographic data.
Listening to your customers means you can make improvements, market something differently, and make your customers feel seen and heard.
Customer-focused and customer-centric products and services
By brand monitoring, you can hear feedback from customers about your products and services. This enables you to make changes and improvements where needed and boost what your customers like.
For example, if you are an ecommerce brand and hear lots of complaints about a specific product, you can look into it and decide whether you should discontinue it or make improvements.
Market research
Market research is something every business goes through, and it’s made more accessible with brand monitoring. You can look for feedback on your competitor’s products or services to see if there’s an appetite for something.
You can also use it to see if you’re missing something and what the levels of conversation are around this to get an idea of whether or not your customers want something.
Better customer support and retention
If you see that your customers negatively talk about one of your products, you can respond to that. Answering in the right way can help with customer retention, especially if something is going wrong and you provide exceptional customer support. This way, you create loyal customers who love your brand.
What to monitor to find influencers and affiliates for your brand
To find influencers and affiliates for your brand, you can monitor a few things to help you find potential new partnerships.
Brand name: Your company name is likely being tagged by influencers and affiliates you are not already working with. If they have brand affinity, they are easier to convince to work with you.
Industry trends and topics: People active in this space talk about industry trends and issues. Your influencers and affiliates will likely be on top of these trends too.
Niche keywords: If there are any niche keywords around the products or services you sell, follow them.
Your competitors: Competitors will likely have potential influencers and affiliates talking about them - this is an opportunity to approach these people and ask if they want to work with you.
When working on your brand strategy, it’s vital to think about which is more important to your business.
Do you want to focus on social media platforms to find new partners with brand affinity, or do you want a wider picture of your brand perception? Is social listening data essential, or do you only care about blogs and forums? You should take these things into account when choosing your tools.
Small businesses will need different things compared to a bigger brand, and for some a social monitoring tool might be better than a brand monitoring tool, and vice versa.
The best brand monitoring tools
Awario
Image source: Awario
Founded in 2015, Awario enables you to find brand mentions all over the web and on social media by crawling 13 million websites every day.
Awario offers you the opportunity to use social selling by finding new prospects and engaging with them, customer care, influencer marketing, and hashtag research to help your business grow.
Join discussions in real-time, research your market and engage with customers.
Features include:
- Powerful analytics
- Tracks in any language
- Boolean search
- Sentiment analysis
- Location-based monitoring
- Social listening reports
- Slack integration
- Social listening API
- Web monitoring
Pricing:
- Starter plan: $39 per month or $24 per month billed annually.
- Pro Plan: $119 per month or $74 per month billed annually.
- Enterprise: $399 per month or $249 per month billed annually.
Brand24
Image source: Brand24
Market leader Brand24 has been around since 2011 and includes Uber, Twitch, and Wondery as clients. They monitor social networks and the web for any brand mentions.
Features are regularly updated, and their analytics tools enable you to stay ahead and analyze your data. You are notified of negative mentions immediately so you can get involved.
Features:
- Automated sentiment analysis
- Report automation
- Analytics
- Export your data
- Discussion volume chart and immediate notification of negative comments
- Slack integration
Pricing:
- Individual plan: $59 per month, or $49 per month, billed annually with two months free.
- Team plan: $119 per month, or $99 per month, billed annually with two months free.
- Pro plan: $179 per month, or $149 per month, billed annually with two months free.
Mention
Image source: mention
mention has three key aspects - brand monitoring, audience listening, and social media management. You can use it to find key influencers, complete competitor research, and automated reporting.
You will not miss a thing. Mention monitors over 1 billion resources on the web, including news sites, blogs, review sites, and forums. Its intuitive interface is easy to use, and keywords get highlighted in texts.
Plus, it’s one of the only brand monitoring software that offers a free option ideal for small-medium business owners and a free 14-day trial.
Features:
- Boolean search
- Customizable alerts
- Precise reporting
- Filters
- Plan and manage your social media
Pricing:
- Free plan: $0
- Solo plan: $29 per month, or $24 per month billed annually.
- Pro plan: $99 per month, or $83 per month billed annually.
- Pro Plus plan: $199 per month, or $166 per month billed annually.
- Company plan: Price on application.
BrandMentions
Image source: BrandMentions
BrandMentions is relatively new to the game compared to the others - it’s been around since 2017. Its use cases include brand monitoring, reputation management, competitor research, business intelligence, and finding partnerships.
It monitors the whole web, not only your social channels, to find brand mentions so you can quickly grow your business.
Features:
- Industry trends information
- Sentiment analysis
- Immediate alerts via email
- Hashtag tracking
Pricing:
- Growing business plan: $99 per month.
- Company plan: $299 per month.
- Enterprise/Agency plan: $499 per month.
Talkwalker
Image source: Talkwalker
Talkwalker calls itself the consumer intelligence acceleration platform, and they have many tools available for brands. The best way to describe them is an intelligence analysis tool. For these tools, there’s no pricing available on the website.
However, the best part is that they offer social media and web monitoring for free, without all the bells and whistles. You need to sign up for alerts, and create the search terms you want. It works in the same way as Google Alerts but it has more depth to it than Google Alerts, and results can be more easily customized and filtered.
Features:
- Boolean search
- Covers blogs, websites, forums, and social
- Easy to filter your results
- Customizable
Pricing:
- Free (for brand monitoring only.)
BuzzSumo
Image source: Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for generating ideas, monitoring your brand and competitors, finding influencers and other brand partners, and creating high-performing content.
They have an archive of over 8 billion articles and 300 trillion social engagements, and Expedia, HubSpot, and Buzzfeed are their clients.
Features:
- Content discovery
- Find influencers and other partners
- Brand monitoring
- Content research
- Slack integration
Pricing:
- Free plan: $0
- Pro: $99 per month or $79 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.
- Plus: $179 per month or $139 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.
- Large: $299 per month or $239 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.
Google alerts
Image source: Google
Google alerts are designed for you to enter search terms and get email digests, including content with your search term. It’s free, though the functionality is limited (there’s no way of filtering things). You can choose whether to receive a daily digest or a weekly digest with all of your alerts in one email.
Features:
- Daily digest or weekly digest
- Option to have all search terms in one email, or each topic emailed separately
Pricing:
- Free
Best social media monitoring tools
The following tools monitor your social media channels for brand mentions and don’t include general web search in their brand monitoring. If you are only interested in social media, these tools can help you grow your business with social media monitoring.
Keyhole
Image source: Keyhole
Keyhole offers social media monitoring and analytics and other tools, including influencer analytics, competitor analysis, and social publishing. This tool is another “all-in-one” where you can manage every aspect of your social media management and monitor social media.
Features:
- Hashtag analytics
- Historical social media data
- Social media scheduling and publishing
- Social listening
- Reporting
- Hashtag and keyword tracking
- Social media analytics API
Pricing:
- Price on application.
Sendible
Image source: Sendible
Sendible is an all-in-one tool that enables you to manage your social media, including social listening. You can track sentiment and have your alerts integrated into Slack.
Founded in 2009, Sendible includes VisitBritain, HobbyTown, and the Government of Queensland as their clients.
Features:
- Sentiment analysis
- Alerts integrated with slack
- Reporting
- Post engagement tracking
- Social streams all in one dashboard
- More integrations than other tools - includes LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter Instagram.
- Co-branding available
Pricing:
- Creator plan: $29 per month or $25 per month billed annually with a 14-day free trial.
- Traction plan: $89 per month or $76 per month on an annual plan with a 14-day free trial.
- Scale plan: $199 per month, or $170 per month on an annual plan with a 14-day free trial.
Hootsuite
Image source: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media management tool where you can utilize social listening and scheduling and publishing, and analytics. The social listening aspect enables you to see what people are saying about your brand in real-time, and you can search for specific hashtags.
With more than 200,000 clients, clients include Ikea, Bumble, LiveNation, and WWF, to name a few.
Features:
- Custom streams for monitoring social channels and hashtags you choose
- Real-time audience insights
- Integrated with other social listening tools for integration
- Create and schedule posts
- Manage social media channels
- Plan campaigns
- Interact with users on different social media channels in one stream
- Six languages supported
Pricing:
- Various plans are available - pricing starts at around $20 with a free 30-day trial.
sproutsocial
Image source: sproutsocial
sproutsocial is a one-stop-shop for social media management - from scheduling posts to social listening and conversation management. This is ideal for people who want to manage their social media.
Their customers include Evernote, Shopify, and Vice.
Features:
- Analytics across earned and owned media
- Competitor analysis
- Real-time results
- Content publishing and scheduling
- Conversation management
- Social selling
- Employee advocacy
Pricing:
- Standard plan: $99 per month or $89 per month billed annually, and a 30-day free trial.
- Professional plan: $169 per month or $149 per month billed annually, and a 30-day free trial.
- Advanced: $279 per month or $249 per month billed annually, and a 30-day free trial.
Agorapulse
Image source: Agorapulse
Agorapulse is another option for complete social media management, including brand monitoring as part of the mix. You can label content to highlight influencers and other partners easily.
Features:
- Trend and competitor tracking
- Unified social inbox
- Content planning, collaboration, and scheduling
- Content labeling
- Recommendations based on user behavior data
Pricing:
- Free plan
- Pro plan $79 billed annually or $99 per month
- Premium plan $199 per month billed annually or $249 per month
- Enterprise plan: Contact them for pricing
At a glance: Best free brand monitoring and social listening tools
These are the tools that have a free option. Of course, with a free account, you get fewer features available.
- Mention (1 alert)
- BuzzSumo (10 searches per month
- Talkwalker (unlimited search terms)
- Google Alerts (unlimited search terms)
##At a glance: Best brand monitoring and social listening tools with free trials
Here’s a list of the brand monitoring tools and social listening tools that offer free trials. Some ask you to insert your credit card details first, while others do not require a card upfront.
14-day trials
30-day trials
Start brand monitoring today
Now that you’ve discovered all of the benefits of brand monitoring, it’s time to choose a software that works for your brand. Depending on what you are looking for, you can choose between complete brand monitoring, or only social media monitoring. The ball is in your court!
