8 Effective Tools for Monitoring the Buzz Surrounding Your Brand

Written by Zac Johnson

Your customers could be liking, mentioning and tweeting about your brand online, but if you aren’t keeping track of this buzz, you can’t take advantage of it. However, with so many platforms in the online space, how can you ensure that you’re catching every brand mention?

That’s where social monitoring tools come into play. Using a tool that monitors online mentions is a great way to safeguard against missing important buzz. Let these tools do the work for you when it comes to tracking brand mentions.

From a simple Facebook search to a service like SEMrush that sends out daily emails, these eight entrepreneurs from YEC share their favorite tools for monitoring online brand buzz.

1. Facebook and Twitter Search

kris-jones The easiest manual way to keep track of brand mentions on social media is to simply use Facebook and Twitter search. Both search engines provide you with a list of all mentions of your brand. At least once a month, you should leverage Google Trends to analyze how your brand mentions are trending over time. –

– Kristopher Jones, LSEO.com

2. Mention

rahul-varshneya We use Mention to monitor conversations and coverage surrounding our brand. You can set it up to listen to the conversations across social media channels, blogs and websites for your personal and company brand. Mention also makes it simple to respond to social media mentions directly from their interface. –

– Rahul Varshneya, Arkenea LLC

3. Inoreader

vik-patel I’m a heavy RSS user. It’s not a fashionable technology, but it’s effective for keeping an eye on published content in my field. My RSS reader of choice is Inoreader, which includes a feature for searching all the public RSS feeds that it has indexed. I have a number of active searches related to our brand and on relevant topics so I can quickly see when and where we’re mentioned in the media. –

– Vik Patel, Future Hosting

4. Rankur

zach-binder Rankur is one of my favorite tools because it scours everything online to see if there is buzz surrounding my brand and where. It hits the most current and relevant content related to my brand, and delivers it continually so I’m always informed.

– Zach Binder, Ranklab

5. Google Alerts

leila-lewis The quickest way is to set up Google Alerts so that every time your company is mentioned, you’re notified. You can’t monitor the whole internet, but Google can! When people post positively about your company, help spread that message by sharing it on social media. If negative comments arise, reach out to the author directly to resolve the issue.

– Leila Lewis, Be Inspired PR

6. Ahrefs

brandon-laughridge Even though the name might look like jibberish, Ahrefs is a fast-growing tool for SEO and online PR types alike. I consolidated my alerts for our brand mentions and our important keywords into its simple dashboard. It’s more robust than Google Alerts, by far. –

– Brandon Laughridge, PolicyZip

7. Brandwatch

brian-lischer Brandwatch is an insanely powerful tool for monitoring buzz surrounding your brand. It gives you access to data from over 80 million sources, including social networks, blogs, news sites and forums. With charting, categorization, sentiment analysis and more, Brandwatch provides a comprehensive look at who’s talking about your brand, plus actionable ways to use that data.

– Brian Lischer, Ignyte

8. SEMrush

matthew-paulson SEMrush is traditionally thought of as a search engine marketing tool, but it also offers a great brand monitoring service. Every day, we get an email that contains a summary of new search results that mention the name of our brand. Whenever anyone mentions our name on a website, we’ll know about it because of the daily email that SEMrush sends out.

– Matthew Paulson, MarketBeat.com (American Consumer News, LLC)

Keep Your Reputation Clean By Always Knowing What’s Going On

Now that you’ve read some of the best methods and tools for monitoring your reputation online, it’s time to start taking action. In addition to all of the resources, tools, and references above, I’d also like to share the following two resources with you as well. Be sure to read through them, as they are loaded up with the latest tools, tricks, and methods being used to protect name brands, social media mentions and reputations on the internet today.