How to audit your brand perception using social data

Don’t assume you know how your audience sees you. Use social intelligence, like sentiment analysis, to move beyond assumptions and understand how people really perceive your brand.

For example, the 2025 Sprout Social Index™ highlights that authenticity is the number one thing customers want from brand content. Yet many brands don’t know if they’re delivering on that expectation.

Without the right tools, it’s tough to track how people feel about your brand.

The solution? Measure brand perception with social data and get the clarity you need to show up authentically and build a brand reputation that earns lasting trust.

What is brand perception?

Brand perception is the way your audience and customers think and feel about your brand. It’s everything a customer has seen, heard and experienced, from your marketing campaigns and reviews to their everyday interactions with you.

This is different from your brand identity, which is what you say you are. Brand perception is what people believe you are. It reflects how your brand makes people feel, what they say about you and how much they trust you over time.

So what influences the way people feel about your brand? More than you might think.

What factors shape brand perception?

People form their impression of a brand over time, based on what they see and experience at every touchpoint.

Brand perception is shaped by factors like:

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Product or service quality:

Your audience will notice if your product or service doesn’t deliver, no matter how polished your branding is. They may not have even used the product or service themselves—reviews and word-of-mouth can shape perception.

• Original, engaging content: Your content shows people who you are, what you stand for and how you can help. When it’s creative and consistent, it builds a brand perception that feels authentic, useful and worth paying attention to.
• Authenticity and brand values: Potential customers look for brands that align with their beliefs, according to the 2024 Ipsos poll on consumer behavior (question 11.e.). When you consistently deliver on your values, you build brand trust and customer loyalty.
• Responsiveness and care: Fast, thoughtful replies, especially on social media, show people you’re listening and you care, helping you build a meaningful connection with your audience.
• Reviews, ratings and customer feedback: Every comment, rating and review tells a story about your brand. People rely on those stories to decide whether to trust you or buy from you.

Each of these factors shapes brand perception. And if you’re not paying attention, you might overlook valuable insights—both good and bad. You may miss opportunities to amplify your strengths or fail to address negative feedback before it spirals out of control.

Why does brand perception matter?

Brand perception is a business-critical insight into how people feel about your brand. When you understand how people think about you, you can strengthen trust, influence purchasing decisions and build long-term brand loyalty.

But it’s not always easy to see the whole picture. Surveys and direct feedback help, but the most honest signals show up in everyday social interactions and media engagement.

This is especially true when it comes to brand reputation. In a crisis, access to predictive media intelligence can be the difference maker in getting and staying ahead of the narrative. This early warning system for your brand goes beyond social channels. It tracks emerging trends and viral content, informs your social strategy and empowers you to protect your brand perception in real time.

So, if you want to know how people feel about your brand and make it better, you need to pay attention to customer perceptions across social networks, media, review sites and influencer content.

Perception is your brand’s equity

Because your brand perception is what people believe, those beliefs form your brand equity—the value of your brand.

It’s not just about your logo, tone or mission statement. You can have the most impressive marketing in the world, but if the customer experience doesn’t reflect the ways you promote yourself, your audience won’t see the value in your products or services.

Perception directly impacts pipeline, loyalty and growth

When customers aren’t satisfied with their experience, they act fast.

In fact, 73% of social media users say they’ll buy from a competitor if they don’t get a response from a brand on social.

It’s proof that consumers don’t just pay attention to how you show up—they make purchase decisions based on it. Consumers gravitate toward authentic brands but stick with the ones that are responsive and interactive.

And these high expectations don’t just apply to social media. They apply to every way your brand shows up.

How to measure brand perception

You can’t improve how people feel about your brand until you understand their feelings. By benchmarking how customers feel and what’s influencing their decision-making, you can take action before minor problems turn into reputational risks.

Here’s how to approach it in a way that delivers meaningful, measurable results:

Define what brand perception means for your team

To measure success, your team needs to align on what success looks like.

After all, brand perception means different things to different teams. Some teams care about customer sentiment, while others focus on brand awareness, loyalty or how they stack up against competitors.

To get everyone on the same page, start by setting clear goals. For example:

• Do you need to improve your brand reputation after a crisis?
• Do you need to build stronger emotional connections with a new target audience?
• Do your marketing efforts accurately reflect your brand values?

By defining your goals, you’ll know which metrics to track to measure your progress and impact.

Find out where brand perception shows up

People don’t form opinions about your brand in one place. They build them through every interaction and piece of marketing.

Your brand perception shows up across:

• Social media platforms (posts, replies, DMs)
• Online reviews and rating sites
• Influencer and creator content
• Search results and auto-complete suggestions
• Forums, Reddit threads and community groups
• Media interest and engagement

Managing all these diverse sources can be challenging. This is where a unified tool like Sprout Social can make all the difference.

It pulls together signals across social networks—brand mentions, hashtags, reviews, DMs, influencer posts—into a single, real-time view. With everything in one place, you don’t just get a holistic view of what people are saying. You can spot patterns, compare perception across networks and track how sentiment shifts over time.

Monitor the metrics that matter

Once you know where brand perception shows up, you need the right metrics to track it. The best way to start is by organizing your brand monitoring efforts into qualitative and quantitative signals.

Why? Because brand perception isn’t just about hard numbers—it’s about feelings. Grouping your efforts into qualitative and quantitative signals helps you balance numerical data with human context. And you need both to understand how people see your brand and why they feel the way they do.

Here are some of the most important qualitative metrics:

• Online reviews (e.g., Google, Trustpilot)
• Social comments and replies
• Influencer content and tone
• Focus groups and open-ended questions
• Sentiment trends across posts or topics

And the most powerful quantitative metrics include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
• Brand perception surveys
• Social share of voice
• Branded search volume and traffic
• Bounce rate on key brand pages

Know where to listen: Social, reviews and real-time feedback

If you want an accurate view of how people see your brand, you need to track more than the comments you’re tagged in.

Look at what people are saying in replies, DMs and comment sections. That real-time feedback offers a front-row view to your audience’s reactions and sentiment. But that’s only part of the story.

For a complete picture, you also need to track what people say when they’re not talking directly to you. That includes untagged mentions, hashtag conversations, quote posts, reviews and reactions to influencer content. These indirect signals reveal how your brand appears in conversations you’re not invited to, but still shape how others perceive you.

Sprout’s Listening Topics and sentiment analysis make it easy to track both direct and indirect brand conversations across channels in one unified stream. And with sentiment trendlines, you can picture these shifts in perception over time. This helps you identify emerging issues, positive or negative spikes and long-term patterns. With this insight, you can adjust your brand strategy accordingly.

Turn insights into strategy

Once you have a handle on your audience’s impression of your brand, you can use that insight to guide your strategy.

For example, if your brand identity claims you’re “cutting-edge” but the feedback says you’re “out of touch,” you need to find the disconnect between your messaging and customer experiences.

To craft effective strategies, share your valuable insights across marketing, CX, product and leadership teams. When everyone understands which themes gain traction and which cause perception drifts, you can align around the right actions to meet your goals.

How to measure your brand perception using Sprout Social

Brand perception is constantly evolving. But with Sprout, you can track it in real time, identify key insights and act fast.

Here’s how you can build a workflow that helps you understand and improve how people see your brand.

1. Create a Listening Topic tailored to your brand

Before you can measure brand perception, you have to capture the full conversation around your brand, including posts you’re not tagged in.

That’s what Sprout’s Listening Topics are for. A Listening Topic pulls in relevant web and social mentions based on keywords you define.

You can set up Listening Topics for your brand name, product names, executive names, value statements, campaign hashtags and even common misspellings. This way, you track every meaningful mention, whether someone tags you or not.

2. Analyze sentiment and volume trends over time

To track shifts in sentiment and daily conversational volume, use Sprout’s Listening dashboard.

It helps you identify spikes in positivity or negativity, benchmark your brand perception against competitors and delve into the conversations that drive those trends. With these visual insights, you can detect risks early and track progress over time.

3. Tag and categorize conversation themes

With Sprout’s Smart Inbox and social listening tools, you can use Tags to organize recurring topics, such as customer praise, service complaints or confusion around a campaign.

By categorizing this feedback into Tag Collections—by theme, sentiment or source—you can spot trends faster and filter insights by what matters most to your brand perception goals.

For example, if you tag every message about “slow delivery,” you might discover it spikes after particular product launches. This helps you quickly identify operational issues affecting brand trust.

By tagging feedback, your team gets a shared view of what’s shaping brand perception, making it easier to align on priorities and report clearly on what to do next.

4. Share a perception report with stakeholders

Sprout’s Premium Analytics tools enable you to build custom reports that highlight perception trends, audience sentiment and key brand themes.

Export shareable dashboards and reports to give leadership the insights they need, secure executive buy-in and prove the strategic value of brand perception efforts.

To build and export a perception report in Sprout, head to Premium Analytics, select your Listening Topic and choose the widgets that reflect key trends, like sentiment over time or top conversation themes.

What red flags should you look for in a brand perception audit?

Not every brand perception issue will be obvious. You need to catch the quieter problems before they slip past you and impact trust or revenue.

A thorough audit helps you catch early signals, such as:

• Abrupt sentiment shifts with no obvious event to explain them
• Misaligned influencer content that misrepresents your tone, values or messaging
• Spikes in negative feedback on specific products, policies or campaigns
• Engagement drops in once-reliable audiences or high-performing segments
• Untagged mentions that reflect confusion, frustration or sarcasm
• Negative customer service themes that appear in public spaces instead of private channels

By catching these patterns early, you can protect brand equity by acting quickly whenever perception starts to dive.

How to improve brand perception

Once you’ve audited how people see your brand, it’s time to act on the insights. Here’s how to start improving your brand perception and online reputation.

Turn negative feedback into fuel for improvement

Use Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Listening to surface recurring customer issues, such as delayed replies or confusing policies. Share visibility to these complaints with your support and ops teams so they can remedy common sticking points.

Amplify positive voices

Use Sprout’s social media listening tools to identify customer praise and reshare it, respond with gratitude or build campaigns that celebrate those advocates.

Align your messaging with audience perception

Don’t rely on what you think your brand identity is—let your audience’s perception be your guide.

Listen to how your audience talks about you and what they value most. Use these insights to update your marketing copy, content and tone to better reflect what matters to your audience.

Use employee advocacy to build trust

Engaged employees are some of your most credible brand advocates.

Use Sprout’s Advocacy Platform to empower them with curated, brand-safe content. Equip them with tools to promote their achievements and provide a space for them to share their stories. That way, when they post about your brand, it earns the kind of authentic reach and trust no ad can buy.

Proactively engage in conversations

Building a positive brand perception takes more than social media posts—you build it through consistency. In fact, consistent marketing efforts contribute to 10%–35% of a brand’s overall value.

But consistency is about more than regularly posting outbound content. Social media isn’t just for broadcasting messages. You build perception through relationships. It’s all in how you communicate and interact with your audience.

By joining conversations and answering questions in real time, you show up as a helpful, “human” brand, reinforcing your brand image, improving trust and moving perception in the right direction.

Turn perception insights into brand impact

Understanding how people perceive your brand is the first step to improving it. A brand perception audit is critical, but it isn’t a one-time task. It’s a continuous process of insight, alignment and action.

Sprout helps you turn real-time social data into a powerful strategy. Schedule a personalized demo to uncover insights, align your team and shape perception at scale.

Brand Perception FAQ

Is brand perception the same as brand reputation?

No.

Brand perception is how individuals feel about your brand based on their personal experiences, what they see online and what others say.

Brand reputation is the public’s overall opinion of your company formed over time.

Perception is more personal and immediate. Reputation is a long-term outcome shaped by many perceptions.

What is the difference between brand perception and brand identity?

Brand identity is what a brand says it is. Brand perception is what the audience believes it is, based on their experiences and interactions. Brand identity is a proactive effort, while brand perception is a reflective outcome.

What are some examples of strong brand perception?

Customers see Apple as innovative, Patagonia as ethical and eco-conscious, and Trader Joe’s as quirky and customer-friendly. In each case, brand perception reflects the brand’s clear, consistent messaging paired with lived brand values.

How often should you conduct a brand perception audit?

You should audit brand perception quarterly or twice a year. But if you’re launching a new product, handling a crisis or entering a new market, it’s wise to audit more frequently to monitor and respond to reactions. This is especially true when a crisis breaks and your team needs to get ahead of the narrative with real-time intelligence across news and social media.

What are the most important metrics for measuring brand perception?

You need both quantitative and qualitative metrics to get a complete understanding of how people feel about your brand.

Key brand perception metrics include:

• Sentiment trends
• Share of voice
• Engagement patterns
• Customer reviews
• Recurring feedback themes

Sprout’s social listening tools can track these at scale and help you spot changes early.