All You Wanted To Know About Tracking Brand Mentions

Besides marketing a company’s products and services, it is vital for a brand to check out its online reputation and how it is being received by the audience. Even in a critical situation when you are looking out at other things to solve a crisis, you are required to check out what is being said about your brand online.

This post will focus on why you need to monitor your brand mentions, all the ways to do it and how you should be responding to all the things that you find on the Internet regarding your brand.

The Need Of Monitoring Brand Mentions

If you are unsure about the need of monitoring your brand mentions, here are some of the reasons why you will need it and make it an inevitable part of your online reputation management.

1) Monitoring your mentions helps in connecting with your loyal customers and the brand advocates.

2) You come to know the overall sentiment about your brand.

3) Getting audience feedback could lead to development of new product or service ideas.

4) You get testimonials for your website

5) It increases the opportunities for link building, as brand mentions without a link could be replaced with a link to your site.

6) Monitoring your brand helps you in figuring out the gaps in your service to better enhance the chances of satisfying your customers.

Do not worry if you are finding negative feedback, or reviews in your search of brand mentions, as each and every mention would bring about a new opportunity for developing a strong brand.

How To Track Your Brand Mentions
There is no dearth of reputation monitoring tools. Here are a few of the best mentions tools that you would ever find online.

Radian6: This till offers a solution, wherein you could setup certain keywords to monitor, track the keywords on blogs automatically, image sharing sites and microblogging sites, and ten get the report with the analysis of the results. The tool captures data in real-time.

It covers all kinds of social media including blogs, image sharing and video sharing sites, forums, review and opinion sites.

HootSuite: It is a social media management for brands to execute campaigns collaboratively across multiple social networks from one dashboard. Launch all the marketing campaigns, identify and grow your audience in addition to knowing the mentions across multiple social media platforms.

You could setup streams of Twitter searches for the brand name and keywords related to the brand.

Trackur: There are various plans available with Trackur for individuals, companies, enterprises and agencies. Just like the name it tracks your keywords and organizes the results for you. Depending on how much you spend on selecting the various plans, you’ll be able to save more keywords and have more frequent updates.

Google Alerts: Perhaps the best free tool to get your brand mentions, this is one tool that straightaway delivers the mentions of your keywords to you inbox giving you the links of all the places where you have been mentioned.

Each time a new result is found on Google, you will get an email notification about the same.
Brand’s Eye: This tool offers reputation management for bloggers, small businesses, and enterprises in different package prices. Brand’s Eye will track every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that will reflect the state of the reputation.

The frequency of how many times you will receive the updates depends on how big the package is.

Ahrefs Mentions Tracker: Mentions Tracker is widely used to identify links and quick references of a website in the news, in blogs, communities, or forums, etc.
A number of logical operators support the mentions tracker and allows improving the search results.

In Which Scenario Should You Respond?

It is a good practice to respond to both good and bad mentions of the brand. Happy customers will feel that you appreciate them when you respond to their good mentions. This could make them returning customers and more positive coverage.

On the other side, responding to negative comments where your brand has been mentioned shows your dissatisfied customers that you are dedicated to them and that you want to win their trust. Although you don’t win the customers back, you will be able to win new fans that should be impressed by the professionalism and dedication.

In case of a crisis, your goal should be to update your customers and via social media, blog, and press releases. Try to respond to as many comments as possible. On the other hand, you could also update your audience on all the channels and direct them to a place where they could discuss their experience with your brand. The place could be company forum, Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform.

If you are looking out for brand mentions for link building opportunities, lookout for the mentions of the company name, but there is no link. On seeing these mentions, contact the author of the post to find out if they would like to link to you. It’s a great way to build editorial links.

How To Keep A Track Of Competitors
In addition to monitoring your own brand, you could also keep a check on your competitors. On doing this, you will discover new link building opportunities, and know the social networks on which you should be more active, and problems you must be experiencing that you could take advantage of.

How are you keeping a track of your brand mentions? Do let us know in the comments box.