Brand monitoring: Why it's essential and the tools to do it

Brand monitoring is essential to thrive online and enjoy a loyal and satisfied audience. However, since it's a multi-faceted area of your business, you need to know how to approach brand monitoring to be effective and beneficial for your brand. And that's what I want to discuss in this post.

Generally speaking, brand monitoring comprises all the tools and solutions your company can use to monitor, analyze, and manage your online presence and reputation in both online and offline channels. With a well-designed brand monitoring strategy, you know what people think about your brand, what they value it for, and what aspects need improvement.

As I mentioned, #brandmonitoring is a multi-faceted area of brand management. If you want to approach this question holistically, consider at least five aspects of brand monitoring.

Let's have a look at five types of brand monitoring tools!

Social media monitoring tools

These tools are designed to help you understand what's going on in social media concerning your brand. Social media monitoring tools gather and analyze mentions related to your brand (or other specified keywords, e.g., industry-related), including conversations, comments, and posts. These tools can help you monitor major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

For example, if you want to monitor Twitter, you can use this tool provided by Hootsuite called Tweepsmap. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a tool that will help you monitor all major social media channels, you can try and go with Sprout Social, Inc.

https://apps.hootsuite.com/apps/tweepsmap

Social listening tools

Even though the name suggests a focus on social media, social listening tools are more comprehensive – they monitor millions of online sources, including but not limited to social media. So, social listening is right up your alley if you want to track what's being said about your brand in news channels, comment sections, internet forums, and other online sources.

This is what we do here at SentiOne. We use AI-powered brand monitoring that helps you stay up to speed with your brand's image and does most analytics work for you. SentiOne has a built-in advanced analytics and reporting feature that lets you get all the relevant, actionable insights almost immediately (no data analysis knowledge required!).

https://sentione.com/features/listen/social-listening-tool

Reputation management tools

Monitoring mentions and comments are one thing. But monitoring and managing online reviews your company gets (e.g., via Google Business Profile, Yelp!, Facebook, and other online review websites) is also important. After all, these reviews frequently have a real influence on other people's purchasing decisions. You want to have as good online reviews as possible, and reputation management tools can help you.

Again, I want to show you a tool provided by Hootsuite – Reputology. With this tool, you can monitor, respond to, and analyze online reviews your business gets online. This tool helps collect reviews from multiple sources, including Google and Facebook.

https://apps.hootsuite.com/apps/reputology

Web analytics tools

Your website constitutes a vital part of your online presence and reputation. Undoubtedly, you want to know what kind of people visit your website, what subpages they visit, and what activities they perform. That's what web analytics tools are about – they track your website's traffic and analyze it to provide easily digestible information. Typically, web analytics tools inform you about the characteristics of your website visitors, sources they usually come from, and actions they perform on your website (e.g., visited subpages, downloaded ebooks, sent contact forms, etc.).

Undoubtedly, Google Analytics is one of the best web analytics tools ever. And what's great about it – GA is free to use. One thing, however. If you already use Google Analytics, remember to migrate your account to GA4 to keep the data inflow undisturbed. Read more about it here.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-use-google-analytics/

Competitive intelligence tools

Lastly, competitive intelligence tools. These tools help you understand how your brand performs compared to your competitors. With these advanced analytics tools, you can compare brand presence, social media engagement, and more. If you dig deeper, you can find tools specializing in a specific aspect of competitive analysis. For instance, Dealavo is an online platform that helps you analyze pricing strategies among producers, wholesalers, and online stores.

At #SentiOne, we also offer competitive analysis for our users. If you want to pursue that, I'd like you to start with this post on our blog: How to analyze competitors with SentiOne.