What is Brand Monitoring?

On the internet, people talk about everything ― and brands are no exception. 

Brand monitoring is the process of finding mentions of any given brand on social media networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and other websites.

Brand monitoring shows you what is being said about the brand and allows you to respond to these conversations. Brand monitoring is done with the help of social listening or, as it is also called, social media monitoring tools. They differ in the number of sources they cover and the level of data analysis that they perform.

Data analysis reveals the statistics and trends behind brand mentions. The user discovers the prevailing brand reputation, as sentiment analysis breaks down all mentions into positive, negative, and neutral. Brand mentions are distributed by location, language, social media source, and other factors, so that you know where the people who talk about your brand are, what social networks they use, and what language they speak. Some social listening tools dig deeper and show the mentions’ authors’ demographics, psychographics, and interests. 

Why should you monitor your brand?

By monitoring your brand name, you find all complaints, compliments, and questions directed at your brand on social media. This means that you can respond to them, increasing the level of your customer service, the level of engagement, and the chances of building a social media community around your brand. This also means you’ll get the real product feedback: you’ll know what users actually like and dislike about the product, what they discuss the most, and what ideas they have for product development. 

Monitoring brand mentions opens up new link building horizons: you can easily discover all unlinked brand mentions on blogs and news sites and reach out to authors with the proposition to add the link. You also discover which journalists and bloggers have already mentioned your brand before and who you should contact to propose a future collaboration.

As noted before, brand monitoring allows the user to discover more about your current and potential customers: their location, demographic, psychographic, social media usage. Brand monitoring reveals brand reputation and shows what it depends on: season, marketing campaign, product launches, influencer campaigns, or something else. It allows you to see how a specific action on your side is changing the level of conversation around your brand and your brand’s reputation in real time. 

What else can you monitor?

Monitoring brands isn’t the only thing you can do. Using the same technology, you can monitor your own name, your competitors, your industry, a specific product, a book title ― almost anything you want. All of these methods have their own advantages. 

1. Competitors monitoring

For example, monitoring your competitors’ names adds massively to any competitor research you’re doing. You discover your share of voice on social media, i.e. how much people talk about your brand compared to how much they talk about your competitors. You also discover the pain points and the wins of your competitors’ products, the results of their marketing campaigns and product launches, and the quality of their customer service. 

2. Industry monitoring

In some cases, monitoring your industries can bring amazing results. There are two main goals for industry monitoring: social selling and influencer marketing.

By monitoring your industry (e.g., “feedback tools”, “vegan restaurants Brighton”, “sci-fi clothing”) and combining them with keywords that signal search intent (e.g., “looking for”, “recommend”, “searching for”) you find people that are looking for your product or service online. These are hot leads waiting to be sold to. All you have to do is react to their posts from the official brand account or as a regular social media user. 

If you’re looking to implement influencer marketing and widen your PR opportunities, look at the most influential people on social media who have mentioned your industry (most social listening tools will combine them for you). Then, filter the results to only see news sites and blogs ― this way, you’ll know which resources often write about your industry and will have a good reason to approach them. 

3. Product monitoring 

Monitoring different products of your brand lets you compare them by social media popularity, discover the problems and advantages of each one, and come up with new marketing ideas for each product. 

4. Name monitoring 

Monitoring your own CEO or any other brand representatives can be very important if those people give interviews, take part in conferences, or participate in other public events. Name monitoring lets the PR manager of the brand spot misquotes, lies, and publications that might be harmful to the company. Of course, it also lets the user spot good PR opportunities, especially if the user monitors competitors’ representatives in addition to the representatives of their own brand.