How and why you need to track brand mentions across networks

Brand mentions on social media are the new word of mouth. They give more visibility into opportunities for brand amplification, but also reveal potential risks and crises, making them a key aspect of social media listening. Businesses use social listening to keep their ear to the ground so they can better understand their audience, monitor brand reputation, trendspot, stay atop of conversations and conduct competitor analysis.

In this article, we’ll define the different types of brand mentions and show you how to monitor them. Plus, we’ll share tips for tracking and increasing brand mentions so you can feel empowered to make informed decisions, build stronger audience relationships and improve your brand reputation.

What are brand mentions?

A brand mention is any reference to your brand’s name, products and services on a blog, website, news article, forum, social media post and other digital channels. Brand mentions can be direct and indirect.

Types of brand mentions

Here’s an overview of the different types of brand mentions across social and other forms of media.

Direct brand mentions

Direct brand mentions are clear references to your brand and occur when someone uses the brand’s name, logo‌ or another identifiable element in their content. They can involve tags, hyperlinks and @-mentions. In the post below, notice how the user includes two @-mentions to thank the brands, Fenty Beauty and Savage x Fenty, for hosting an event.

Imagine a celebrity donning your apparel and posting a picture with your brand account tagged—that’s the kind of brand mention that can send your visibility soaring. Responding to this brand mention is a golden chance to boost brand recognition and engage with your audience in an organic way.

Indirect brand mentions

Indirect brand mentions are more subtle. They happen when someone talks about a product, service‌ or event associated with the brand, but they may not use a tag or @-mention. They may not say the brand’s name, but allude to it. For instance, if someone says how much they love the latest Star Wars movie, it would be an indirect brand mention for the Walt Disney Company. In the post below, a user shares an unboxing video showing Fenty Beauty’s 2024 advent calendar. Notice how the user doesn’t tag the brand directly, doesn’t capitalize the brand’s name or use the official name of the product.

Indirect mentions can also include misspellings, slogans without brand names and product-only references. For example, someone saying they prefer iPhones because they enjoy using FaceTime would be an indirect mention.

Social media mentions

Social mentions are likely the ones you’re most familiar with. These are brand mentions on social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter). An @-mention typically marks them, but they can also be in the form of tags, hashtags, comments or posts. For example, if someone posts about how much they love your new product and tags your company with a branded hashtag or @-mention, that’s a social media mention. Social media mentions can also be indirect, such as someone discussing your brand in a thread. For example, Hyatt Centric Midtown Atlanta tagged the accounts for non-profit Atlanta Pride and AtlannaTonight, a media company, in a post about their partnership for Atlanta Pride Weekend.

Blog mentions

These brand mentions occur when your brand, product, service or even specific content you’ve created is referenced in someone else’s blog post. This could be anything from a brief mention with a hyperlink to an in-depth discussion. For instance, if a food blogger writes about their favorite products and includes your brand in the listicle, that’s a blog mention.

Media mentions

This is a broader brand mention term that encompasses any mention of your business in the media, including both traditional and digital publications. This includes news articles, editorial pieces, TV or radio broadcasts, podcasts, magazines, etc. A newspaper writing an article about your company’s recent production innovations is an example of a media mention. Media mentions can include social media and blog mentions, but they’re not limited to these. For example, Sprout Social data was highlighted in an AdAge article about athlete-influencers.

Reviews and testimonial mentions

These are instances where your brand, products and services are discussed on review platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews or TripAdvisor. For example, if a customer writes a review on OpenTable about their experience with your restaurant, that’s a brand mention on a review site.

Forum and community mentions

These occur when your brand, products or services are mentioned or discussed in online forums or communities used for open discussions and can include sites like Discord, Reddit, Quora and specialized forums (e.g., tech forums, gaming communities). If someone posts a question about your software on a tech forum and other users respond with their experiences, those are considered brand mentions.

Understanding the different types of brand mentions are important because they reflect brand sentiment, or in other words, how and where your brand is perceived.

Why brand mentions are important

Recognizing the importance of brand mentions is key for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and customer relationships. Brand mentions help fuel online reputation monitoring. These unsolicited references can help you gauge brand awareness and customer sentiment, giving you the information you need to make informed decisions and adjust your strategies based on data.

Brand monitoring and awareness

Brand mentions are a powerful tool for measuring brand awareness. If you track and monitor brand mentions, you get a clear picture of your brand’s reach and how well it’s recognized. They have an impact on SERPs because Google recognizes brand mentions as a trust signal and rewards sites that have a strong reputation online. By tracking how often, where and what is said about your brand, you can understand how effective your marketing efforts are and identify growth opportunities to help you allocate more resources. This will also help you optimize your campaigns and maximize your visibility in a competitive environment. Overall, paying attention to brand mentions aids with determining awareness, along with brand monitoring.

It’s important to note that brand monitoring and social media monitoring are not one in the same, but they do complement each other. ‌​​Social monitoring focuses on social media coverage, while brand monitoring covers social media plus other external places where people are talking about your brand. Brand monitoring combines social monitoring and social listening with other methods of tracking brand mentions on non-social media channels to collect audience insights.

Customer feedback and sentiment analysis

Brand mentions offer a unique opportunity to gather customer feedback through sentiment analysis. Mentions are part of sentiment analysis because all brand mentions are either positive, neutral or negative—regardless of if they are direct or indirect. Brand mentions provide real-time insights that enable businesses to understand how customers perceive their brand, products and services. By comprehending the content and sentiment of brand mentions, companies can glean valuable insights into their customers’ perceptions and preferences. Positive mentions signify customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and advocacy, while negative mentions reveal issues, dissatisfaction or unmet expectations. This information can help your team make informed decisions about product development, marketing and customer service strategies.

Strengthen customer care

By keeping an ear to the ground, you can swiftly respond to praise and criticism, demonstrating your brand’s attentiveness and commitment to customer satisfaction. Addressing concerns raised in negative mentions, companies can demonstrate responsiveness, rectify issues and strengthen customer relationships. For instance, if a surge of negative mentions is detected, social and care teams can promptly address the underlying issues to turn the tide. If you track brand mentions, you can engage in real-time conversations and interactions with your customers. This proactive approach to social listening enables you to respond to customer inquiries, address concerns and build stronger, loyal relationships.

Competitor analysis

Brand mentions support competitor analysis by providing insights into public perception of your industry contenders, helping identify market gaps and opportunities, and allowing for comparative analysis of brand visibility and sentiment. They also offer real-time updates on competitors’ activities and can highlight customer preferences, enabling businesses to strategically position their offerings. Additionally, monitoring competitor brand mentions can uncover crisis management strategies and areas where competitors may be faltering, presenting opportunities for differentiation.

How to monitor brand mentions

By being proactive in tracking brand mentions, you can stay ahead of the curve and respond to feedback quickly and effectively. There are several techniques you can use to monitor brand mentions.

Manually search brand mentions

One effective method for tracking brand mentions is to manually search social media and websites for relevant keywords. This includes major networks like Facebook, Instagram and X, along with popular forums and review sites. By regularly checking these, you can identify brand mentions and engage in conversations with customers.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free tool that can help you save time manually tracking mentions. You can create alerts for your brand name and other relevant keywords. Once you set the cadence for alerts, you’ll get email notifications each time a brand mention appears in search results, simplifying the process of tracking and monitoring brand mentions.

Social listening and monitoring tools

You can monitor brand mentions manually, but we recommend using a social listening or monitoring tool like Sprout to automate the process. Sprout is a powerful tool for monitoring and tracking brand mentions across various platforms. Here’s how you can use it to stay on top of conversations about your brand:

• Social Listening: Set up Sprout Social’s Listening solution to track mentions of your brand name, product names and relevant hashtags across social media, including X, Instagram, Facebook and more. This will help you capture direct mentions (like @-mentions) and indirect mentions (where your brand is discussed but not tagged).
• Custom queries: Create custom queries to monitor specific keywords, phrases or even competitor brands. This enables you to tailor your listening to capture the most relevant conversations.
• Sentiment analysis: Sprout analyzes the sentiment behind brand mentions, helping you understand whether the conversations around your brand are positive, negative or neutral. This can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and potential issues.
• Real-time alerts: Set up alerts to receive notifications whenever there’s a significant spike in brand mentions or negative sentiment to respond quickly to emerging issues or capitalize on positive trends.
• Engagement: Sprout’s Smart Inbox enables you to view and respond to brand mentions directly on the platform. This is crucial for engaging with customers, addressing concerns and building relationships—it also eliminates the need to respond natively and toggling between multiple networks.
• Reporting and analytics: Use Sprout’s Reporting tools to track trends in brand mentions over time, identify peak conversation times and measure the impact of your engagement efforts. This data can inform your social media strategy and help you make data-driven decisions.
• Competitor analysis: Monitor mentions of your competitors to gain insights into their strategies, customer sentiment and market positioning. Identify opportunities to differentiate your brand, fill gaps and improve your offerings.

By combining manual monitoring with automated tools, you can keep a close eye on brand mentions across channels, so you’re always in tune with the market and your customers’ needs and expectations.

Tips for tracking and increasing brand mentions

Tracking brand mentions is a crucial part of measuring the success of your marketing efforts and uncovering valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors. To monitor and increase brand mentions, consider implementing these tips:

• Regularly monitor platforms where your audience is most active: Keep a close eye on social media review sites, forums and industry-specific blogs where your target audience is likely to engage and discuss topics related to your brand.
• Use social listening tools: Automate brand mention tracking with social listening tools like Sprout. These robust tools offer comprehensive monitoring and analytics. You can get real-time data, filter mentions by sentiment and track keywords and hashtags so you can gain more insights into your brand’s digital footprint and customer interactions.
• Encourage user-generated content: Encourage your customers and followers to actively share their experiences, reviews and opinions about your brand by promoting user-generated content (UGC) campaigns. UGC increases brand mentions while building credibility and community with your target audience. Consider organizing contests, giveaways or challenges to incentivize customers to share their UGC and amplify your brand’s reach.
• Engage with your audience: Respond to brand mentions promptly and thoughtfully. Engaging with your audience shows you value their opinions—whether it’s positive or negative—and nurtures customer relationships.
• Collaborate with influencers and industry thought leaders: Form partnerships with industry experts, leaders, journalists and media professionals to increase your brand mentions and expand your reach. Collaborate with influencers who share your brand’s values and target audience to create sponsored posts, reviews or product demonstrations that showcase the benefits of your brand and encourage their followers to engage.
• Optimize your website and create content for search engines: Make sure your website is optimized for search engines by incorporating relevant keywords, updating meta tags and descriptions and creating engaging content that speaks to your audience. By boosting your search engine rankings, you’re more likely to have your brand mentioned in online conversations, articles and others’ blog posts. Create blogs and social media content about your brand’s story, products and services to build awareness and provide value to your target audience.

Use brand mentions to prove your social ROI

By monitoring brand mentions, you can gain immediate feedback on customer perceptions and market trends. Whether you use manually or automated brand mention tracking, taking a proactive approach enables you to adapt quickly to market demands, boosting customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth. See our social listening ROI guide to help you further maximize your investment in social media marketing.