Your phone buzzes, you look down. Someone mentioned your brand on LinkedIn\u2026 but not in a good way. You boot up your laptop with one hand and reach for the Red Bull with another. Welcome to the world of brand monitoring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But often, brand monitoring is more than just responding to comments that mention your brand\u2014it\u2019s about understanding customer sentiment and using feedback to shape your brand reputation in real-time.<\/p>\n

What is brand monitoring, and why is it important?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Whether you like it or not, conversations happen about your brand constantly. Some are good, some are bad. Brand monitoring is the most effective way to keep track of these conversations.<\/p>\n
Brand monitoring is the process of identifying conversations and reacting to them. You can amplify positive comments or extinguish negative feedback before it potentially spirals into a public drama and impacts your reputation.<\/p>\n
How you react helps shape your brand\u2019s narrative, positively or negatively, which is why it\u2019s important.<\/p>\n
The tools you need for brand monitoring are often determined by what part of the online space you need to monitor.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s often assumed that brand monitoring only<\/em> happens on social media, but in my opinion, it can occur in three places online\u2014websites, social media, and\u00a0LLMs.<\/p>\n
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So, if you want to monitor your brand effectively, you need to monitor it in these three places.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how you do\u00a0it:<\/p>\n
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1. Brand monitoring on social media<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Social media is the fastest way for customers to give real-time feedback on your brand, so it\u2019s often the first place marketers think of when they think of brand monitoring.<\/p>\n
To get started, consider which platforms conversations about your brand happen on most frequently.<\/p>\n
Identify social media platforms your customers are\u00a0using<\/h3>\n
Do your customers use LinkedIn, X, Facebook, TikTok, or something else? Wherever they are, you need to find a tool to help you monitor platforms where your customers frequently mention your brand on social media.<\/p>\n
Here are a few of the most popular paid social media brand monitoring tools and the platforms they support:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n Facebook<\/th>\n Instagram<\/th>\n X<\/th>\n LinkedIn<\/th>\n Threads<\/th>\n TikTok<\/th>\n YouTube<\/th>\n Pinterest<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Brandwatch<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u274c<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u274c<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sproutsocial<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u274c<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mention<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u274c<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u2714\ufe0f<\/td>\n \u274c<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
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Sidenote.<\/p>\n
Some social networks like LinkedIn don\u2019t have a publicly accessible API, so for monitoring platforms like this, you\u2019d need to use one of the paid tools above or try my \u201chacky\u201d methods below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
If you don\u2019t want to use a paid tool, there are other ways to monitor your brand for free. For instance, at Ahrefs, we monitor Twitter, or \u201cX\u201d as it\u2019s now known, using a webhook in Slack<\/a>.<\/p>\n
More simply, we get a feed of \u201cahrefs\u201d mentions in our Slack workspace. It looks something like\u00a0this.<\/p>\n