What is brand monitoring and why is it important? [+ tools]

Your business’s health and longevity means keeping a watchful eye on your brand’s public perception. There are more ways than one your audiences can talk about you on social media. Luckily, brand monitoring has never been easier, thanks to advances in digital social media management tools and analytics platforms.

These advanced tools help you scan a variety of social platforms easily and quickly so you can keep a tab on chatter around your brand and be proactive in your brand strategy. You’re also able to easily track brand performance through online reputation monitoring and brand sentiment analysis to encourage data-driven decisions and meaningful customer engagement.

In this article, we’ll give you the scoop on brand monitoring, including how it’s different from social monitoring, its advantages, plus top tools to consider to amp up your brand strategy.

What is brand monitoring?

Brand monitoring is the process of tracking different channels to identify where your brand is mentioned. Knowing where and how people are talking about your brand will help you better understand how people perceive it, and it lets you collect valuable feedback from your audience. You can also keep an eye on potential crises and respond to questions or criticism before they get out of control, so you can protect your brand’s reputation.

Brand monitoring vs. social monitoring

Social monitoring focuses only on the social media coverage your brand gets, whereas brand monitoring covers social media plus other external places where people are talking about your brand.

Brand monitoring combines social monitoring and social listening, along with methods of tracking brand mentions on other non-social media channels to collect audience insights.

For example, brand monitoring will inform Fenty Beauty how its target audience feels about its products by looking at relevant posts and comments.

Beyond the brand’s social comments, it’ll also inform the brand of how the market perceives its strategic marketing decisions, such as its collaboration with Target.

Why brand monitoring matters

As a brand, it’s important to care what the audience you’re serving thinks. You might not agree with some of the opinions you see about your brand, but this helps you understand how people feel about your brand and products. Your public perception and how you respond to public feedback can play a huge role in brand growth.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 94% of business leaders believe that social media data and insights have a critical impact on building brand reputation and loyalty. Plus, more than 90% thought it was pivotal in improving competitive positioning and gaining a better understanding of target audiences.

Here are a few of the ways that brand monitoring can have an impact on your business.

Understanding sentiment

Brand monitoring can help you better understand the overall sentiment that people have toward your brand. A sentiment analysis tool looks at the specific language used in comments about your brand. It can tell you if people are talking about your brand with a positive, negative‌ or neutral sentiment.

This is a great way to read between the lines and observe, on a large scale, how people react to certain posts, campaigns or your brand in general. Monitoring tools like Sprout Social let you access a detailed sentiment analysis. Sprout’s Social Listening combs through your post comments and mentions to create a social sentiment summary that shows you how your audience feels about your brand.

Reputation and crisis management

Monitoring your brand can help you stay on top of your reputation and handle customer issues before they get out of control. Listening to reviews and feedback online and having a process for responding and handling those issues promptly can increase audiences’ trust in your brand and show that you actually care about what customers are saying.

In fact, per the 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 69% of consumers want brands to respond to their comments and questions within the same day.

Identifying issues and improvements

In addition to monitoring your brand’s online reputation, it’s also important to monitor social media comments for potential feedback that can help you identify improvements to your product or service. When gathering feedback from your audience, make sure you have a good process in place to relay the feedback to the proper teams in your organization who can implement changes and updates.

Bonus Resource: Find out how brands implement takeaways from consumer conversations with our guide to 40 specific ways social listening can impact your business.

Creating two-way communication

Publicly responding to reviews or comments shows your audience that you are actively listening to what they’re saying. It also shows that you’re readily available to answer questions and assist customers.

It also gives you an opportunity to partner with the right influencers to increase your brand awareness and engagement, riding on relevant social media trends. Case in point, Lyft’s collaboration with influencer Jooles Lebron, where the influencer talks about passenger etiquette while riding in a Lyft cab and includes her now-famous tagline—”Very demure. Very mindful.”

Identify user-generated content

User-generated content can act as a great complement to your content strategy. By monitoring your brand mentions, you can see who is sharing content about your brand. This is also a great way to find new influencers to work with who are true ambassadors of your brand and source new content for your social media channels.

What brand elements should you monitor?

When monitoring your brand, it’s tempting to monitor every mention of your brand everywhere people might talk about it. But it’s important to be intentional about what you’re monitoring and the channels you choose to keep an eye on. This prevents you from collecting an overwhelming amount of data that’s difficult to draw conclusions from, and helps you get more clarity out of the results you find.

Some of the main channels to monitor are:

• Online news media
• All social media platforms
• Online forums such as Reddit and Quora
• Online review management on sites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp
• Print media (if you have the resources to check relevant publications actively)

In addition to tracking the right channels, make sure you track all the elements of your brand that might receive publicity—like branded hashtags, variations of your brand name, your brand mascot—anything relevant that might pop up in conversations about your organization. When deciding what elements to monitor, choose ones that are relevant to your brand and industry.

Here are a few of the key brand elements to consider monitoring for conversations mentioning your brand.

Name variations of your brand and products

Make a list of all of the ways people refer to your brand. This can include nicknames, blog names and other variations of words that your brand is associated with. Some people may use different spellings or abbreviations of your name, so it’s important to track all the variations you know. Keyword research on branded search terms can help you identify variations and even common misspellings.

In addition to variations of your brand name, it’s also a good idea to track variations of your campaigns or product names in case you receive publicity or comments referring to those specific aspects of your brand. For example, the X post below, where a customer posts about Starbuck’s pumpkin spice latte as PSL.

 

All of this will help you stay informed on the conversation around your brand, even when your audience doesn’t directly mention brand accounts.

Branded hashtags

Branded hashtags can streamline your brand monitoring by aggregating all related social media content under a specific, unique keyword. This makes it easier for you to track mentions, analyze sentiment and gauge how your marketing campaigns are performing.

Encourage customers to use specific hashtags and then track them to effectively monitor and measure the reach and impact of your campaigns. This will help you strengthen your online presence as well as create a sense of community around the brand.

Hashtag analytics also help you understand the context in which branded hashtags are being used and shared by people, which can help you refine messaging and strategy on-the-go to drive more effective engagement.

Competitors

It’s good to know what your competitors are up to and what their audience is talking about to make sure you’re up to date on the latest industry news. You can analyze your competitors to set a benchmark for how your brand measures up to other similar brands in your industry.

Many online social mentions tools let you run a competitor analysis to measure how your social media activity compares to others. Sprout’s competitor report lets you compare your social presence to competitors to track how your performance changes over time.

Track your metrics over time alongside the information you gather through brand monitoring to see how everything from industry news to changes in your content strategy influences your audience growth and engagement.

Brand monitoring can also help you understand the impact of specific tactics you’ve incorporated in your wider strategy, like influencer partnerships and campaigns. If you’ve created hashtags for those efforts, or tagged your posts in Sprout, you can bucket and track these posts to understand what types of campaigns and response efforts succeeded, and which ones failed to connect with your audience.

Industry buzzwords and trends

If you’re in a specific niche, it’s a good idea to keep track of trends or buzzwords in your industry. Even if these conversations don’t mention your brand directly, it helps to stay informed about what’s being said about your industry as a whole. This can also be a good source of inspiration for new content ideas or to join the conversation in innovative ways.

Joining in on conversations that aren’t just customer service or complaint-driven helps show that your brand is active in your overall industry, and just as involved in the latest news or trends as the dedicated audience in your niche. It could be as simple as chiming in on seasonal trends like Dell does by commenting on Starbucks’ Fall flavors.

CEOs and public figures

You should also monitor mentions of public figures or spokespeople for your brand or a specific campaign. Make sure you’re monitoring conversations around your CEO or any other prominent figures associated with your brand. Even if the news around the person isn’t directly related to business operations, how company leaders are portrayed in the media can affect how people think about your brand as a whole.

Brand sentiment

Brand sentiment is the emotional tone and perception that people associate with your brand based on their experiences, conversations and interactions. Monitoring it can be very important to improve your brand strategy.

You can assess your overall brand health by identifying customer attitudes and pinpointing potential issues or opportunities to improve. Plus, use the same strategy to understand your competitors’ brand sentiment. This will help you gather a broader perspective on how your brand is positioned in the market.

It’s essential to track aspects such as mentions, hashtags and customer reviews when monitoring brand sentiment. This helps identify the context around brand conversations. Also pay attention to visual elements like logos or branded content to ensure they align with customer expectations and evoke the intended sentiment.

AI-enabled tools like Sprout help you measure all of this through customer sentiment analysis. Effectively monitor feedback, reviews and comments, and get tangible insights into how and why you’re seeing positive, neutral or negative brand sentiment.

Together, these elements will help you shape stronger reputation management and customer engagement strategies.

4 brand monitoring tools

Here are four brand monitoring tools that provide actionable insights on social brand sentiment.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout helps you monitor your online presence with comprehensive, data-driven tools that analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) across social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as review sites like Reddit.

Our AI-powered Social Listening tool enables you to track mentions, keywords and branded hashtags quickly. This helps you gauge brand sentiment and uncover trends in customer conversations about you and your competitors, so you can use those insights to pivot or reinforce campaign strategies.

Filter through billions of data points in seconds and find trends, insights and key learnings that act as guard rails for your brand strategy. For context, Sprout’s Listening tool processes up to 50k posts per second and an average of 600 million messages a day.

Plus, use our Competitive Analysis tool to compare your performance against industry peers through specific metrics. These include follower growth, engagement ratios and post reach, all of which are benchmarked against competitors, so you get a clear picture of where you stand against them.

Sprout’s automated Analytics and Reporting tools aggregate all your brand monitoring data and provide you with actionable insights such as sentiment, engagement rates and share of voice.

You can further customize your reports to focus on important brand elements, such as campaign performance, or to see how well your influencers are doing. This will help you quickly identify areas that need attention, provide timely responses to customer feedback‌ and take a proactive approach to emerging issues.

2. Mention

Mention specializes in real-time brand monitoring and provides alerts for mentions of your brand across social media, blogs, forums and other online sources. Its analytics dashboard enables you to track sentiment, monitor keyword trends and gain insights into how their brand is being discussed online. You can also categorize mentions based on sources and sentiment.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a straightforward tool that sends email notifications whenever your brand or specified keywords are mentioned online, covering news, blogs and other web content. While it lacks advanced sentiment and social media tracking features of the dedicated brand monitoring tools, it’s highly effective for keeping tabs on specific mentions or trends without much setup.

You can customize how you track different keywords, competitors or industry terms, making it easy to stay informed about new content related to your brand. Its ease of use and broad web coverage make it a good option for smaller businesses that don’t need comprehensive brand monitoring platforms.

4. Zoho Social

Zoho’s brand monitoring tool, Zoho Social, enables you to monitor keywords, hashtags and brand mentions across social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. You can also analyze brand sentiment to understand audience’s perception about your brand. Zoho’s reporting tools measure campaign performance, track audience growth and compare results over time.

The value of brand monitoring

Brand monitoring makes it easier to identify how people feel about your brand. This knowledge can inform your marketing decisions and help you create campaigns your audience will love. Plus, you’re able to promptly offer assistance when your customers need it and proactively monitor your competitors to ensure you’re ahead of the game.

Whether through sophisticated social listening tools or simple keyword monitoring, using the right brand monitoring solution will empower you to protect your reputation, optimize your content and brand strategies and drive long-term growth.

Request a demo to learn how Sprout can help you level up your brand monitoring.