The Best Brand Monitoring Tools

The internet and social media, in particular, is full of people who discuss various topics. These topics could be related to your brand, industry, or how other companies in your industry are performing.

Whether it is a big-time celebrity promoting your product or someone posting a negative tweet that goes viral, no one knows what the upcoming day could bring.

However, you can change that by using brand-monitoring tools and social media monitoring tools to stay on top of all the news and updates regarding your business.

Brand Monitoring Explained

As the name implies, the process of brand monitoring involves checking various online channels to see your company’s online image.

In other words, it allows you to find mentions on different platforms on the internet and assess what people think about your brand. It could even include an article about a viral complaint on Facebook.

Ultimately, the purpose of brand monitoring is to have enough data to take the necessary action to improve your brand reputation. Keeping track of things with a keen eye can help you spot a crisis from far out.

Things that Every Business Should Monitor

Fundamentally, you want to keep an eye on as many places as you can. Whether you are running a multinational business or a tiny one, you must know that most customers have their online voices, and they do not shy away from speaking their minds.

Plus, with smartphones becoming more prevalent than ever, people could even be discussing your brand while they’re in one of your outlets.

Here are some areas and channels you should monitor:

• Broadcast Media
• Review Sites
• Social Media Platforms
• Blogs and Online Publications
• Forums
• Print media (Magazines, Newspapers, etc.)

What You Should Track

Of course, tracking brand mentions should be your priority. However, there are several other areas that you should consider. People will not always talk about your business directly. Sometimes, they discuss your industry in general as well.

These discussions could have valuable information that could have a secondary impact on your brand.

Tracking the following can help you create a successful branding strategy:

Important Staff Mentions

Do you have any famous members present in your staff that have some influence on your industry? Try to monitor discussions about them.

This also includes C-level employees. Generally, monitoring staff mentions helps business owners to pull some good publicity about their employees. However, it also comes in handy to suppress negative stories from becoming viral online.

Product and Brand Mentions

You probably do not need much explanation here, but make sure you keep tabs on when people talk about your products. It could provide you tons of direct mentions, which often carry great importance.

Influencers and Industry Related Updates

Checking discussions happening about your line of work is vital. If you are not following the latest industry trends, you could be missing out on a lot of profit and possibly damaging your company's image.

Besides your industry, you should also keep an eye out for related terms in various press releases.

Inbound Links

Make sure that you track inbound links to your company's website because if you don't, you could be overlooking many good or bad references about your brand.

Best Brand Monitoring Software

There are plenty of brand monitoring tools online. The ones listed below are some of the best. Each of them has aspects that make them unique:

TweetDeck

If you want an excellent online brand-monitoring app to keep track of your brand’s mentions on Twitter, choose TweetDeck. It is user friendly and has superb functionality.

The software allows you to create search columns, which provide you live updates on anything that you specify. The app is free and especially great for brand mentions.

LexisNexis

Keeping track of print and broadcast media can be quite tricky. No one wants to spend money to hire employees to watch every channel and read every newspaper to get updates about their brand.

Fortunately, there is an excellent tool that makes this job easy; it goes by the name of LexisNexis. While you will find tons of other tools that do the same thing that this brand monitoring software does, LexisNexis is among the best.

The app will help you monitor tons of publications while analyzing other search results simultaneously.

Google Search Console

As discussed earlier, tracking inbound links about your brand is essential. Doing that without an automated software can be quite challenging. Luckily, you can use Google Search Console to perform this task.

Setting up this free tool is simple. The only downside to the app is that it does not offer as much depth as other software does. Plus, while it will provide you every inbound link about your brand, it will not analyze or sort them. Nonetheless, it is still worth having, especially considering that it’s free.

Netpeak Checker

Looking for a free and easy-to-use brand-monitoring tool? Take a look at Netpeak Checker. To get started with this software you need to enter your relevant keywords, and you will receive the list of URLs where blogs or websites have been mentioning your brand name.

Also, you can use this program to check on-page parameters of your or competitors’ websites or to get to know your website ranking using certain keywords. That said, this software’s features are incredible, which is a surprise considering it is free (the only limits are on a copy, save, and export data from software).

Ahrefs

Ahref’s brand monitoring services are unique. The software has an SEO feature that provides you a detailed look into your brand's online reputation.

Once the app is up and running, it will display every anchor text and internal link used online. You can even check your domain's strength with this tool. With Ahrefs, you can track what others are saying about your brand and its website online with ease.

Unlike other tracking tools mentioned in this article, this one is not free. However, it's well worth the price.

Google Alerts

Looking for a free and user-friendly brand-monitoring tool? Look no further than Google Alerts. All you need to do with this software is to enter your desired search terms, and you will receive notifications whenever someone uses them.

You can use this app for tracking several things, ranging from your brand name to how popular it is on various platforms. That said, this platform's features are quite basic, which isn't a surprise considering it is free.

Bottom Line

With several brand-monitoring tools available these days, finding one to rely on can be tricky, especially for first-time users. Choose the apps mentioned above, and take your brand-monitoring to the next level.

It would be advisable to start with free apps to see what these tools are all about and then go for a premium tool with advanced features.