Brand Monitoring Tools: Protecting and Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation

In today’s digital landscape, brand reputation is more important than ever. Monitoring your brand’s online presence and staying aware of what people are saying about your business is crucial. That’s where brand monitoring tools come into play. In this blog, we will explore the world of brand monitoring tools and their significance in managing your brand’s reputation, tracking customer sentiment, and staying ahead of your competition. From social media monitoring to online review tracking, these tools provide valuable insights to help you make informed decisions, engage with your audience, and protect your brand’s image. Get ready to unlock the power of brand monitoring tools and take control of your brand’s online narrative.

Top Brand Monitoring Tools Every Brand Should Consider

1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence

Founded in 2010, Brandwatch can help you with social media listening, publishing, measurement, and customer data management. With the data that it offers, your brand gains a competitive edge over its competitors as you’re equipped to make more informed decisions.

Its social listening tools let you keep track of conversations about your brand and its offerings in multiple languages. In addition to tracking mentions of your brand, you can also use it to identify popular topics and hashtags. This information allows you to create more effective marketing campaigns for better engagement and reach.

Considering that it can help you with much more than brand monitoring, Brandwatch is a great choice if you’re searching for an all-in-one tool to tackle every social media aspect. That being said, it does come at a price.

Key features:

• Tracking of more than 600 metrics
• Custom reporting via an intuitive drag-and-drop builder
• AI identifies increases and drops to inform you about unusual activity
• Automatic notifications regarding negative comments
• Historical data of up to a year
• Unlimited search queries

Pricing:

After a free 14-day trial, pricing starts at $108 per monthly seat when billed annually.

Rating:

4.8

2. Brand24

Trusted by big brands like Twitch, Tailor Brands, Uber, Intel, and Stanford University, Brand24 is one of the older brand monitoring tools. They quickly carved a name for themselves after the company was founded in 2011, and, to this day, they’re still one of the leading tools for brand monitoring.

One of the main reasons behind this tool’s success is its list of features continuously updates. In addition to brand monitoring, it offers first-class analytics to help you boost your marketing and branding strategies. Not only does it list social mentions, but it also helps you to make sense of those mentions’ impact, such as the engagement stats on comments and shares.

While it boasts powerful functionality, it’s pretty easy to get started. Whether you want to monitor more than one brand or specific campaigns, its setup is flexible enough.

Key features:

• Access to brand mentions across podcasts, social, blogs, forums, and videos
• Segmentation of positive, negative, and neutral reviews
• Instant notifications for negative mentions
• Automated reports
• Important metrics like reach, engagement, and hashtags

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $59 after a free 14-day trial.

Rating:

4.6

3. BrandMentions

Unlike Brandwatch and Brand24, BrandMentions is newer and launched only at the end of 2017. It offers more than basic listening. Users are given a comprehensive picture of every mention worldwide to understand their online presence better. It will also pick up brand mentions on blogs, review sites, and other non-social sites.

All its plans also offer multiple projects which you can use to monitor the social handles of your competitors too. This can serve as a good yardstick to put your brand’s performance into perspective. Plus, it will give you valuable insight into their target audience (aka potential new customers for you) and how they market to them.

Key features:

• Consistent information about the trends in your industry
• Instant alerts via email
• Sentiment analysis
• Analysis of your top competitors’ performance

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $99 per month after a free 7-day trial.

Rating

4.6

4. Talkwalker Analytics

Brands like Adidas and Duracell trust Talkwalker’s top comprehensive features. It’s the only tool that empowers brands to analyze brand exposure in the video.

With Talkwalker, setting up the different topics you want to monitor is difficult. Also, it’s more suited for bigger brands needing an enterprise-class software solution.

Key features:

• Video and image recognition
• Tracking in 187 languages
• Advanced sentiment analysis in 25 languages
• Instant, automated alerts
• Smart spike analysis
• Access to historical data of up to two years
• Conversation clustering
• Customizable dashboards

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $9,000 per year.

Rating:

4.5

5. Keyhole

With Keyhole, you can track the name of your brand, offerings, or competitor across all social media sites and millions of websites. Using its intuitive dashboard, you’ll get an overview of post volume, engagement volume, number of impressions, and reach volume. This basic data will give you a good starting point. It then takes it one step further to offer sentiment analysis which is useful for competitor analysis.

Unlike similar tools, Keyhole also offers hashtag analytics. While it doesn’t relate to brand monitoring, it’s useful for curating content and help it reach more people.

Key features:

• A volume predictions feature informs you when posts about your brand are set to go viral
• AI-driven sentiment analysis
• A QuickTrends feature for identifying trends across social media
• Account recommendations

Pricing:

Enterprise solutions are available. You’ll need to contact Keyhole directly for more information about the pricing and free trial.

Rating:

4.5

6. Mention

Founded in 2012, Mention caters to both agency and enterprise clients. In addition to offering real-time brand monitoring, its software can also be used for competitive analysis, custom insights, and automated reporting.

From press articles to review websites, you can monitor more than 1 billion sources across the web with Mention. It’s a great tool to help you manage your brand’s reputation online, plan your social media content, and engage with your audience. Its interface is super intuitive, and the keywords you’re searching for are highlighted in yellow, making it even easier to find your way around the software.

Key features:

• Advanced alerts
• Smart folders
• Pulse emails to inform you whenever there’s a peak of mentions
• Boolean query

Pricing:

For individuals who want to dip their toes into brand monitoring, it offers a Free plan. For the ability to track more mentions, its plans start at $49 per month.

Rating

4.7

7. Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers another feature, Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch (another tool on our list). With it, you can stay informed about discussions relating to key topics, track brand mentions, and monitor the activities of your competitors. Alternatively, if you’re already using Hootsuite for social media management, you can conveniently integrate Talkwalker to get important insights via your dashboard.

One of its most useful features is that you can get alerted instantly of any unusual spikes to identify possible customer complaints that can go viral. This makes it a lot easier to get ahead of a crisis.

It also offers a personal AI analyst, affectionately dubbed Iris. With this sidekick, you can quickly transform raw data into insights and identify important conversations that others might overlook.

Key features:

• Boolean strings
• Industry-leading consumer insights
• Several filters that include date, demographics, and location
• Customizable reports

Pricing:

After a generous free 30-day trial, pricing starts at about $99. For information about Hootsuite Insights specifically, you’ll need to contact its sales team, which will be able to confirm the pricing information.

Rating

4.6

8. YouScan

YouScan is trusted by brands such as McDonald’s and Adidas and offers five products in total. Similar to Talkwalker, it also boasts image recognition features. With this feature, you can identify logos in digital media to help you protect the reputation of your brand or measure sponsorship ROI.

You can do that if you want to gather all your brand mentions using keywords. Its real-time mention stream gives you access to more than 500 billion historical conversations!

Key features:

• AI-powered automated data segmentation
• Flexible filters
• Spam filtering
• Duplicates feature to merge repeated posts
• Competitive analysis
• Custom dashboards
• Automatic reports via email

Pricing:

You’ll need to contact YouScan directly for information about its pricing.

Rating

4.8

9. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers an advanced listening tool that you can use to listen in on discussions about your brand. It offers five pre-built topic templates, including a Brand Health template that makes it easy to stay on top of public conversations about your brand or its products on a curated list of websites from Social Gist and social networks like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Though, it does offer some limitations. For example, you can only listen for your brand name in descriptions of YouTube videos and not the comments. Also, with Facebook, you can pick certain pages, as it doesn’t allow you to listen to the whole network.

Key features:

• Industry insights
• Event monitoring
• Competitive analysis
• Intuitive reports
• Sentiment research
• Competitor comparison

Pricing:

After a generous free 30-day trial, pricing starts at $249 per month.

Rating

4.4

10. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is one of the most comprehensive social media management tools and includes features to help you with brand monitoring across Twitter and YouTube. You can also use it to track unlimited hashtags on Instagram, while its Listening feature will automatically collect public mentions of your Instagram business profile.

While it doesn’t crawl nearly as many online sources as most other tools on our list, its interface is pretty simple, making it easy to identify your parameters for listening. It also lets you assign items to specific team members, making it a good tool to consider if you’re part of a bigger team.

Key features:

• Boolean Search
• Labeling of important content
• Unlimited saved searches
• A mobile app

Pricing:

After a generous 30-day trial, pricing starts at $49 per month when billed annually. It also offers a limited Free plan for individuals getting started.

Rating

4.5

Conclusion

As we conclude our exploration of brand monitoring tools, it becomes evident that they are vital for businesses aiming to safeguard their brand reputation and maintain a competitive edge. By effectively monitoring your brand’s online presence, tracking customer sentiment, and staying updated with industry trends, you can proactively address issues, engage with your audience, and make data-driven decisions. Brand monitoring tools provide actionable insights and help you protect your brand’s image while maintaining a strong and positive online presence. So, invest in the right brand monitoring tools, tailor them to your needs, and leverage their capabilities to elevate your brand’s reputation management efforts. Get ready to actively monitor and protect your brand’s online presence in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

FAQs

What are brand monitoring tools?

Brand monitoring tools are software or platforms that help businesses track and analyze their brand’s online presence. These tools monitor channels such as social media, websites, blogs, forums, and news sites to provide insights on brand mentions, customer sentiment, and industry trends.

How do brand monitoring tools benefit businesses?

Brand monitoring tools offer several benefits to businesses. They allow businesses to proactively manage their brand’s reputation by tracking online mentions, addressing customer concerns, and responding to feedback promptly. These tools also provide valuable insights into customer sentiment, competitor analysis, and emerging trends, helping businesses make informed marketing and business decisions.

What features should I look for in brand monitoring tools?

When choosing brand monitoring tools, consider features such as real-time monitoring, sentiment analysis, social media listening, competitor tracking, customizable alerts, and comprehensive analytics. These features enable businesses to stay updated on brand mentions, assess customer sentiment, track competitor activities, and derive actionable insights from the data.

Can brand monitoring tools help with crisis management?

Yes, brand monitoring tools play a vital role in crisis management. By monitoring online conversations, businesses can detect and address potential crises early on, minimizing their impact. Brand monitoring tools provide real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, and social media listening capabilities that enable businesses to proactively manage crises, respond promptly, and maintain a positive brand image during challenging times.