Consumers today are smart and more intelligent than ever. They are well-informed and all their purchase decisions involve thorough research and understanding.
They are constantly browsing through the vast expanse of the web to learn about different brands and their products, and to know other people’s opinions and express their own.
Hence, it is safe to say that the digital world is a prime space where your brand is constantly spoken of.
It would be a huge miss if you don’t track and capitalize on these brand mentions – both positive and negative!
You ask why?
For starters, monitoring brand mentions lets you tap into your customers’ top of mind, get honest feedback, and learn about their experiences, among other things.
They even help you scout potential leads and acquire new customers!
With that said, you can be assured of the immense value monitoring brand mentions offers to any brand.
To help you make sense of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of it, I’ve created this ultimate guide on brand mentions that explains why it is a fantastic investment for every brand out there.
Here’s an overview of all that the blog entails:
- What are brand mentions?
- Why are they important?
- How to monitor brand mentions?
- Analyzing brand mentions effectively
- Best tools you can use to track brand mentions
Let’s dive in!
What are Brand Mentions?
Brand mentions are references to your brand or product on the internet. They often appear in customer reviews, blog posts, news articles, and social media.
Brands should ideally stay on top of these mentions, gather insights, gauge public opinion and track brand sentiment.
As a brand, you can choose to get notified when people use certain keywords like the name of your brand or specific products and track those.
Types of Brand Mentions
Let’s look at the different types of brand mentions across various channels you should track.
1. Social Media Mentions
You’d find a relatively large share of brand mentions across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit, to name a few, because that’s where people are the most active.
Brand mentions on social media appear as new posts, comments, or stories.
These mentions could either be brand endorsements or product reviews.
Here’s an example of a brand mention on Twitter.
People have been calling out Flipkart for their recent orders that were either not shipped or got unreasonably cancelled during their Big Billion Days sale.
2. Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are one of the primary reasons your brand would get mentioned online.
Customers leave feedback about your products and services on your brand’s website, third-party apps, social media platforms, online forums, and even digital communities.
Have a look at this customer review posted as a comment in one of the most trusted Facebook groups.
3. Blog Post Mentions
When you write a blog on a particular topic and choose to mention and link the source, that’d be a blog post mention (for the brand whose article you linked).
Similarly, if someone mentioned your brand and linked one of your blogs across any channel, that’d also be a blog post mention.
Have a look at this blog post where we shared about the different types of community marketing ideas and mentioned brands that have used it.
P.S. This validates the genuineness and meaningfulness of your content and helps increase your DA (Domain Authority).
4. News Articles
Your brand name can get mentioned across different online news publications when you achieve a new milestone or host any events or workshops.
Or even when a senior leader of your brand has an interview lined up with any news publication.
Convosight was in the news when we raised $8M Series A funding. Sharing a snippet from one of the news articles for your reference.
Keep up with these brand mentions and reshare them on your social media platforms as it helps build credibility and spread the word about the latest happenings.
Why are brand mentions important?
One of the primary benefits of tracking brand mentions is online reputation management. Brands are constantly looking out for any negative traction and settling it.
While online reputation matters the most, it’s actually one of the many benefits brand monitoring offers.
Here’s sharing the other reasons why you should be monitoring brand mentions:
1. Sentiment Analysis
While the number of leads generated and the total conversions that happened is what every brand is looking for at the end of the day, they’re also equally willing to understand what people think of their brand and products.
Take the example of Nestle Purina Pro, a leading pet care brand. They did a community marketing campaign with Convosight to reach out to pet parents in closed communities, generate awareness about the benefits of colostrum in puppies’ diets, and understand what people have to say about their product.
The campaign was successfully executed in 54 relevant communities with over 2.2M members.
It attracted over 3.1K UGC posts and generated over 1.7K brand mentions, of which 70.4% had a high positive emotional attribute.
2. Customer Engagement
No brand wants to disappoint customers by not responding to their messages or communication and lose out on them.
Hence, another reason why brand monitoring matters.
Brands today are innovating with how they can communicate with their customers and potential customers and are making an effort to be present on almost all the platforms their TG is the most active.
Which is why brands have started leveraging community marketing because their consumers are sharing their pain points, interests, product feedback in digital communities.
Wondering why Community Marketing? Check out this blog to know 👇🏻
Why community marketing should be a part of every brand’s marketing mix
3. Improved Customer Service
When you take the time to listen to your customers’ queries, requests, feedback, and grievances and respond to them timely – half the battle is won!
There’s nothing better than a satisfied customer and their loyalty.
When you earn the trust of your existing customers, they’ll not only appreciate you and keep coming back but also spread the word and drive word-of-mouth advocacy for your brand.
Sunsilk is an excellent example of how brands should ensure active brand monitoring.
They have a Facebook group of brand loyalists named Girlgiri Sisterhood, where women constantly share their advice, seek suggestions on anything and everything, and uplift one another.
Additionally, members share their thoughts about Sunsilk products every now and then.
Interested in creating your brand community? We can help.
SCHEDULE A CALL and one of our community marketing experts will get in touch with you.
4. Effective Research & Development
Every brand out there is constantly looking for ways to improve its products.
And monitoring brand mentions is one of the best ways to go about it.
When you do that, you will come across what customers and potential customers are talking about your brand and the things they like and dislike about your products and services.
Look at these tweets done by people recently during the ongoing Flipkart’s big billion days sale.
Flipkart suffered a massive backlash from people this time and they can refer to these tweets and other similar posts to improve their customer service and experience for next time.
This is where you derive all your insights which will define your course of action.
Hence, brand monitoring has proven to be an effective research strategy and has helped inform essential marketing strategies and product development.
5. Increase Sales
With brand monitoring, you can quickly identify sales opportunities from online discussions. You can not only convert customers who’re in the middle of the funnel but also attract potential customers who might be using your competitors’ products.
That being said, invest in some good brand monitoring tools (more about them ahead), and you’ll be able to get access to some advanced reports.
These will give insights into your customers’ demographics, social reach, total engagement, and sentiment analysis data.
Your marketing manager can use this information to strategize their sales efforts – double down on what’s working and how and give up on the strategies that aren’t, thereby impacting the overall sales.
Now that you know why monitoring brand mentions on social media and elsewhere is paramount, let’s look at how you can do it best.
But first, let’s understand what exactly you should be monitoring. You don’t want a brand monitoring strategy without knowing what to watch, right!
How to monitor brand mentions?
There’s more to monitoring brand mentions than basic keyword research that includes just your brand name. In this section, we’ve covered all the key things you need to pay attention to.
1. Variations of your brand name
First things first – people won’t always search for your brand name as is. Abbreviations, spelling discrepancies, shortened names, special characters (including or excluding) and everything else in between should be considered.
So, spend some time and list such variations of your brand name. This list won’t be the final one and you’ll find yourself updating it the more you engage with your users.
Tracking name variations would bring those conversations in the spotlight that would have never made it in front of you otherwise.
If you’re a large brand, you can search for localized brand names tailored to a specific market.
Take the example of the beverage brand Coca-Cola. Their brand mentions strategy would involve tracking keywords like – coke, coca cola, cocacola, Coca Cola, Coke.
2. Product names
While your brand name might be extremely important, it’s highly likely that people wouldn’t always mention it.
And that’s where your product names come in!
Track the names of all your products and their common variations. This way you will be able to understand what people are saying about each of your products and you can take the desired action.
3. Product Features
I bet this is one of the most overlooked areas of brand monitoring!
Since people often discuss product features and benefits on the internet, you can use those to track brand mentions.
While the keywords might be more customer-centric, you can explore them, tap into user conversations and get some great insights.
For instance, a hospitality brand would want to target “best budget hotels in XYZ (region)” to monitor industry trends.
4. Industry trends and related keywords
Taking the example mentioned above, when a hospitality brand searches for “best budget hotels”, they will most likely discover conversations around their competitors and the ongoing trends in the industry.
Go through them to understand people’s expectations of the products and services in your industry.
You might as well come across some trending keywords of your industry – list them down and monitor them.
5. Social media handles and relevant hashtags
It is pretty standard for users to tag your brand name and use relevant campaign hashtags on social media. So, make sure you don’t miss out on that!
Tracking brand mentions with your social media handles and related campaign hashtags ensures you’re on top of important user conversations across all social media platforms.
Analyze brand mentions effectively
So far, we’ve understood why tracking brand mentions is important and how you can monitor them.
Now, let’s spend some time learning how to comprehend all the gathered information to use it effectively.
The first and the foremost thing you need to remember is –
Never look at brand mentions as a separate entity.
Couple your existing data set with “Category Mentions / Conversations” and “Sentiment” to derive valuable insights that will help determine your next steps.
Let’s look at this in detail and understand how.
1. If both Category Mentions and Brand Mentions are high 🔼
Go through the conversations to understand what characteristics and features of your brand are being discussed.
While you do that, don’t forget to check the sentiment, i.e. which feature attracted positive reviews and which ones got negative feedback from the users.
With this you’ll know what people liked and disliked about your brand. You can easily tackle the negative feedback by making the necessary changes to your product and even communicate the same to your customers.
As for the positive reviews you come across, you can double down on the winning content and use that communication across other social media channels.
2. If Category Mentions are high🔼 and Brand Mentions are low🔽
Understand what’s working and what efforts are going down the drain for your brand.
In this case, your focus should first be scaling what’s working. Simply because – it will help create more awareness and consideration for your brand.
Post that, you should prioritize tackling the negative sentiment.
3. If Category Mentions are low 🔽 and Brand Mentions are high 🔼
This would mean that whatever little conversations are happening in your product category mainly entail your brand.
Determine what characteristics of your brand or product members are talking about the most and see which ones are not getting any traction.
In addition, gauge the positive feedback your brand is getting and use that to increase the overall category conversations of your product.
4. If both Category Mentions and Brand Mentions are low 🔽
The strategy would be simple in this case – tap into the characteristics or features of your products that members are leaving reviews for (both positive and negative), and double down on the winning features.
Use that to generate awareness about your brand, which would further help increase category conversations.
This serves as a framework as to how you can monitor brand mentions effectively.
Brand mentions alone won’t tell you what people say about your brand.
But, if you look at brand mentions in context with sentiment and category conversations, you can easily decipher the humongous data you gathered.
When looking at brand mentions, we need to focus on determining what characteristics or features people are talking about – for your product and competitors’ products.
For instance, you’re a beauty brand tracking brand mentions across all social media channels. You found that fragrance is one of the most talked about things.
Now, you should figure out the sentiment around it. The same goes for other features as well.
Plum, India’s first-ever vegan beauty and skincare brand, did a community marketing campaign in collaboration with Convosight in 78 Facebook groups with over 3.9M members.
The objective was to generate awareness and drive consideration for the brand products highlighting the brand USPs.
They successfully achieved 3K+ brand mentions and witnessed a 33.5% increase in the share of voice, up from 7%.
The brand got over 95% positive sentiment, and of the 3K brand mentions received, 20% were linked to active recommendations. The campaign also succeeded in scaling skincare category conversations from 45K to 85K, an increase of almost 2x!
If you’d like to know more about Plum’s community marketing campaign, please refer to this
👉🏻CASE STUDY👈🏻
The highlight here is – Plum did not do a marketing campaign and tracked only brand mentions. They monitored brand mentions in collaboration with category conversations and sentiment.
Brand monitoring tools like Convosight can help you track brand mentions for your community marketing campaigns.
What differentiates them from the other brand mention tools out there is that they allow you monitor brand mentions along with category conversations and sentiment.
However, other brand monitoring tools help you access only brand mentions across different social media platforms.
Let’s look at the different brand mention tools that exist and what they have to offer.
5 Best Brand Monitoring Tools You Should Get Your Hands On
1. Convosight
Convosight is the world’s first community marketing platform that connects brands with community creators.
It has enabled 150+ brands like Veet, Plum, Amazon, Maggi, Pediasure, Aashirvaad, and Unacademy, to name a few, to run over 1000 successful community marketing campaigns.
Through these campaigns, these brands were rightfully able to monitor user conversations across thousands of relevant Facebook groups with millions of members.
Not just brand mentions, Convosight also helped them track the total category conversations, user sentiment, user intent, total engagement, and UGCs received on posts, among other things.
If you’d like to understand about some successful community marketing campaigns, please feel free to go through this blog 👇🏻
Ten brilliant community marketing examples from top brands that will leave you inspired
2. Google Alerts
It is one of the easiest and quickest solutions to monitoring your brand mentions.
Not only that, Google Alerts also helps you stay up-to-date with regular industry trends, like any upcoming events, press conferences, new releases, and more.
At the same time, you can gain knowledge about your competitors. If they are releasing new features or products, they quickly learn about the positive or negative feedback they’re getting.
What’s best about this tool is that it’s pretty straightforward, easy to use, and suits all sorts of businesses – whether a small business, startup, or large enterprise brand.
The icing on the cake, you ask me? It’s completely free to use!
You need to sign up with your Google account, and voila! You are done.
3. Awario
If you wish to learn about each new relevant brand mention immediately – then Awario is for you!
This social listening tool crawls over 13 billion web pages daily in addition to the APIs, thus making sure you stay on top of all your brand mentions.
It will gather alerts from all social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and news sites, and instantly notify you.
As they put it, “Awario helps you find considerable discussions on social networks and join them in real-time. You can easily spread the word about your product, service, or content across social and the web to reach new audiences and trigger word-of-mouth marketing.”
4. Mention
Mention enables brands and agencies to monitor millions of conversations across the web, like news sites, forums, and press articles, and also includes social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to name a few, and derive actionable insights from them.
The tool even helps you schedule your posts in advance and publish them across the desired social media channels.
Moreover, you can easily engage in the discussion through the Mention app, which is super easy to use.
One of the best things about this brand monitoring tool is that it converts the gathered insights into high-quality reports that comprise infographics, pie charts, bar graphs and more, making it super convenient for its users to analyze the information.
You can even share these reports with your teammates and choose a specific date and time to receive these reports in your mailbox.
5. Talkwalker Alerts
Yet another brand monitoring tool that hunts the entire web, including social media platforms, to give you consolidated alerts about the keywords you track data for.
More than half a million users trust Talkwalker Alerts, and the platform positions itself as a better alternative to Google Alerts.
However, the only difference is that the latter is completely free of cost, and the former offers different paid subscription packages for its premium features.
What sets it apart from its competitors is that Talkwalker prioritizes channels that get the maximum engagement. Simply put, it will give you an update about the mentions that have an impact.
Brand Mention FAQs
Ques. How to get brand mentions?
Ans. There are five ways to attract brand mentions:
- Customer Feedback: Encourage customers to leave reviews for your product or service from time to time.
- Guest Blogging: Reach out to bloggers in your niche and collaborate with them for a link back to your website.
- Social Media: Enhance your social media presence or build one (in case you still haven’t) because that’s where users are most active and are likely to mention your brand and engage in discussions.
- Interviews: Reach out to vloggers and podcast owners in your niche and offer to share your story and expertise.
- Events: You can host events or participate in the ones happening. Either way, the payoff will be high brand mentions.
Ques. Where can I find brand mentions?
Ans. You can find most brand mentions on social media, followed by customer reviews, blog posts, news articles, videos, and more.
Ques. How to find brand mentions on social media?
Ans. You can check brand mentions on social media with the help of third-party tools like Awario, Social Mention, Tweetdeck, and Google Alerts, to name a few.
These brand monitoring tools not only help you track social media brand mentions but also across different websites on the internet.
However, if you’re specifically looking to track brand mentions in Facebook groups, Convosight is the one-stop solution.
That’s about it!
Reiterating the key takeaway – No matter which category your brand belongs to, monitoring brand mentions is the key to growing your brand, deriving actionable user insights, and building a loyal following, which would drive word-of-mouth advocacy.
Invest in the right brand monitoring tools, keep a check every now, and stay on top of your brand mentions!
REACH OUT TO US if you’re looking for a brand monitoring tool to help you gauge your brand’s mentions, sentiment, conversations, and so much more across thousands of relevant Facebook groups.
Creating value in the lives of others with my content, little by little.✨
Working at Convosight, I do more than just wrangle commas. I’m passionate about innovating new ways to create super valuable and actionable content about Communities and Community Marketing at large, and sharing it with the right audience.
I also happen to manage a global community of power admins on Facebook, and that’s where most of my learnings come from.
Do check out my latest blogs and feel free to share them! 💛