Since customers are the foundation of any business, it’s important to listen to them.
Be it on social media or throughout the entire web; your audience can be anywhere, and identifying what they really need is essential for growth. The best way to achieve this is to stay honest, observe their opinion, and be attentive towards them.
Your customers’ constructive feedback is necessary to make things better for your business.
Once you start interacting with your customers and listening to them, you’re opening avenues of good and positive perception of your business. This, in turn, will potentially help you be regarded as a user-centric brand.
Keeping that in mind, I’ve compiled this list of brand monitoring tools for your brand to take the growth a notch higher. If that sounds interesting, let’s jump straight into it. 😉
This great tool for social listening; SproutSocial, helps you understand your audience to the deepest roots. You can utilize industry, brand, and competitive insights to find out relevant topics and better understand user sentiments.
You can gather insights and use them not only on social media but also on other areas of development, such as customer care, new products, and overall marketing. There are a lot more features to it, and you can try them all using the free trial.
BrandMentions
As the name suggests, BrandMentions allows you to skim through the entire web and find relevant mentions. It is a great indicator of finding customers and promoting products in the right places. Not only that, but you can also build relations in the process and enjoy a larger brand exposure.
You can find out the conversations that are brewing about your brand or products and even instantly identify the tone in which they’re conversing. This is essential in understanding the emotions behind the mention.
Since competitor analysis is such an important aspect of marketing, BrandMentions lets you spy on your competitors and analyze the top players in your niche. You can choose to research and get insights on any topic too.
Lastly, you’ll be getting real-time notifications regarding the latest links and mentions directly to your inbox.
Awario
Awario hits right at the target by making brand monitoring really quick and efficient.
You can enter the keywords for Awario to scramble the web. This will help you track the mentions and react just in time.
Subsequently, you can use the built-in sentiment analysis to segregate the source of the positive and negative comments. Its analytics further help you to track the platforms, influencing factors, changes in the market reaction, etc.
You can find posts asking for recommendations or ditching competitors so that you can pitch yours right away. With the Boolean search, you can tailor set the search for mentions based on a variety of factors like the country, platform, etc.
In addition, Awario lets you export data-rich white-label reports with just a click. Finally, you can use Awario on a desktop, mobile, or tablet to never miss an update.
Brand24
Brand24 has a much wider reach, covering social platforms, news portals, blogs, forums, and more. It is robust and 100% GDPR compliant. Their mentions from Facebook and Instagram are collected from the official Facebook API, and this speaks volumes.
You can expect these monitoring data from Brand24:
- Number of mentions
- The mood of the mentions
- Types and number of interactions
- Most active Twitter mention areas
- The context behind the mention
- Influencers from your niche
The great thing is this solution lets you compare your performance with your competitors and come up with better tactics.
Mentionlytics
Dedicated to social media platforms, Mentionlytics allows you to access mentioned insights, look for influencers, and acquire leads. It also helps you prevent a reputation crisis by jumping into customers’ issues and solving them at an early stage.
You can choose to keep a watch on your competitors by simply entering their brand keywords, and you’ll be presented with all their mentions across the platforms. The feature that I am most fascinated by is sentiment analysis. It can skim through all the mentions and tell you whether or not the conversation held a positive sentiment while writing it.
On top of all that, you can also integrate Mentionlytics with Trello and HootSuite.
Google Alerts
There’s no way I’d be leaving out the good old and reliable Google Alerts from this list. This company is known for its quality services, and this is definitely one of them. Also, the simplicity of this tool is worth talking about.
No fancy design or extra unwanted features; it does what is actually required. You can create alerts for all purposes, be it for your brand or just about anything. A few weeks back, I created an alert for my website’s domain to check if it’s being linked to from other sites, and this tool did the work wonderfully by notifying me via email for every backlink.
Similar to this, you can use Google Alerts for your benefit and stay notified of anything related to your interest.
Boardreader
If your main focus is on message boards and forums, then Boardreader might be what you’re looking for. This tool crawls and finds discussion panels to show what people are saying about you and your brand (or just about any keyword you put in).
It’s very simple in nature but quite useful because, more often than not, people carry out genuine conversations in forums and comment sections. Trying to find those manually is an unimaginable task, so you’d definitely want to use this tool for that.
Hootsuite
Best known as a social media management tool, Hootsuite also has a brand monitoring feature that works brilliantly. You can search for conversations by keywords, hashtags, or locations, that too, in multiple languages.
Once you find the appropriate conversations, you can quickly respond to them either by yourself or assign them to your team members. You can also add certain apps to further enhance your monitoring.
Hootsuite is one of the most popular solutions out there, so you can hardly go wrong with them.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch can pull out data from 100 million sources and over 1.3 trillion individual posts. That’s massive, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s used by companies like Samsung, BBC, and Walmart.
They have an advanced AI technology called “Iris” that does most of the incredible work in this tool. You know a service is great when the technical aspects are partially controlled by AI. Things are bound to go most of the time smoothly.
You can quickly and easily add new data sources to fetch information from areas that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It has a flexible UI and a smart support team to fall back on at any given time.
You can get started by filling out the form on the page.
Mention
Rated 4.5/5 stars on G2 Crowd, Mention can help you monitor, analyze, and work upon over 1 billion sources on the web. You can discover relevant insights and share them with your team members so that you can focus on other aspects of your business.
Apart from that, Mention allows you to:
- Analyze your competition
- View brand perception based on conversations
- Easily understand and listen to your audience
- Manage and schedule social content
You can try out their entire suite at no cost for a start using the free trial.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a very powerful social media management tool. It boasts very well-thought-out features, a clean and user-friendly interface, and a well-crafted knowledge base. This not only makes Agorapulse very easy to use but also highly functional for tracking and analyzing your entire social media performance.
While Agorapulse isn’t mainly a brand monitoring tool, it can help you with everything you need to build a strong social media presence. It provides detailed analytical reports about brand mentions, performances, sentiment analysis, audience demographics, growth, and more.
It supports all major social media platforms, including Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google Business. Plus, you can connect it with Google Analytics to gather insights about website traffic directly on your Agorapulse dashboard.
Pros
- Clean and user-friendly interface
- Comprehensive monitoring features
- Powerful social media management features
- Can help you find influencers that would potentially collaborate with your brand
- Provides detailed analytical reports
Cons
- Slightly pricier for small businesses
- Limited features in lower-priced plans
Pricing
Agorapulse offers a forever-free plan with limited functionality, along with a 30-day free trial to their paid plans. Their paid plans start at $49 a month.
Emplifi
Primarily known as a social media management tool, Emplifi’s robust listening capabilities make it an excellent choice for social media monitoring. For instance, its brand monitoring feature deeply monitors mentions across all major social media platforms, forums, news websites, blogs, and more.
Apart from that, you can configure the monitoring feature with additional filters like keywords, hashtags, sentiments, etc., to pull brand-related conversations. Whenever Emplifi identifies any important mention, it instantly notifies you so that you can respond quickly to your audience.
In addition to that, Emplifi’s advanced AI tools use NLP to label brand-relevant conversations automatically based on their tone. This can help with sentiment analysis for your brand, competitors, or specific topics to understand the trend and audience perception.
However, this web monitoring feature isn’t available by default on Emplifi’s Essential plan. It is only available as an add-on in higher-priced plans.
Pros
- Monitors web blogs, news websites, and forums, along with social media platforms
- Sends real-time notifications about brand mentions
- AI-powered auto-labeling and sentiment tagging
- Supports integrations with DAMs, CRMs, and other APIs
- Detailed analytical reports with custom dashboards
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Quite costly
- The Listening feature is only available in higher-priced plans
Pricing
Emplifi Essential costs $2400 per annum, but you won’t get access to the Listening feature on this plan. You need to opt for a higher-cost plan, and for that, you need to contact their sales team.
While Zoho Social isn’t exclusively designed for social media monitoring, it could help you with decent monitoring needs. It notifies you in real time about all the mentions, comments, and replies across all connected social media channels in its Live Stream tab.
You also get a quick snapshot of the profile of the person who has engaged with your brand in the Live Stream tab. This snapshot includes the number of times they have engaged with your page, their total number of followers, etc. This way, you can find emerging influencers to collaborate with.
Zoho Social could also help you with a basic understanding of the sentiments of users towards your brand or niche. You won’t get a detailed breakdown of sentiments that you may find on tools specifically designed for brand monitoring, but you will get info on whether the sentiments are positive, negative, or just neutral.
Although Zoho Social offers extensive coverage to social media platforms, you will be limited to one brand only. As a result, Zoho Social would not be a good bet for social media marketing agencies.
Pros
- Affordable plans
- User-friendly interface
- Supports all major social media platforms
- Real-time alerts of user engagements
Cons
- Not suitable for complex monitoring tasks
- Limits you to one brand only
- Basic reports and sentiment analysis
- Lack of collaboration options in lower-priced plans
Pricing
Zoho Social offers a 15-day free trial with plans starting at just $10 a month. However, the Monitoring dashboard and Livestream features are only available on Professional and Premium plans, which cost $30 and $40 monthly, respectively.