As part of your brand’s social strategy, it’s key that you use a brand monitoring tool. This way, you’ll be able to de-escalate a situation or possibly even prevent a negative comment from gaining any momentum whatsoever.
Actually, it’s much more than just damage control. With the help of a good tool, you’ll also be able to keep track of all the positive things that people are sharing online about your brand and its offerings. This information can be just as useful to help you improve your marketing strategy. After all, everyone (even the big brands) has those moments of vanity where they simply want to stare at their likes. As long as you have a solid social media strategy in place and act on the information, we won’t judge you for counting your likes every now and again for no real purpose.
While many social media management tools offer some type of social listening feature, there are a number of tools that make brand monitoring one of its primary focus areas. Here are 18 of the top brand monitoring tools that you can check out to measure your performance over time.
Best Brand Monitoring Tools:
Founded in 2010, Brandwatch can help you with social media listening, publishing, measurement, and customer data management. With the data that it offers, your brand gains a competitive edge over its competitors as you’re equipped to make more informed decisions. Its social listening tools let you keep track of conversations about your brand and its offerings in multiple languages. In addition to tracking mentions of your brand, you can also use it to identify popular topics and hashtags. Armed with this information, you can create more effective marketing campaigns for better engagement and reach. Considering that it can help you with much more than simply brand monitoring, Brandwatch is a great choice if you’re searching for an all-in-one tool to tackle every aspect of social media. That being said, it does come at a price. Key features: Pricing: After a free 14-day trial, pricing starts at $108 per seat per month when billed annually. If you’re a regular IMH reader, you’ll know that we’ve featured Sendible a number of lists about social media scheduling tools. In addition to using it to schedule content for platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram, you can also use it for brand monitoring. One of its eight standard reports is dedicated solely to what’s being discussed about your brand. Another useful feature is that you can also use it to monitor keywords and then filter the results by source (e.g. review sites, social networks, blogs, or news) or sentiment. Key features: Pricing: After a free 14-day trial, pricing starts at $29 per month. Trusted by big brands like Twitch, Tailor Brands, Uber, Intel, and Stanford University, Brand24 is one of the older brand monitoring tools on the market. They quickly carved a name for themselves after the company was founded in 2011 and, to this day, they’re still one of the leading tools for brand monitoring. One of the main reasons behind this tool’s success is that its list of features continuously gets updated. In addition to brand monitoring, it also offers first-class analytics to help you boost your marketing and branding strategies. Not only does it list social mentions, but it also helps you to make sense of those mentions’ impact such as the engagement stats on comments and shares. While it boasts powerful functionality, it’s pretty easy to get started. Whether you want to monitor more than one brand or specific campaigns, its setup is flexible enough. Key features: Pricing: Pricing starts at $79 after a free 14-day trial. A significant factor behind Digimind’s sustained success is their commitment to innovation. More than just a brand monitoring tool, Digimind integrates advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI technologies, covering an impressive array of 82 languages, slang included. This enables businesses to tap into a broader spectrum of online chatter, capturing the nuances and sentiments of global audiences. Its user-friendly interface makes it a breeze to get started, ensuring brands can actively manage their reputation without missing a beat. Whether you’re looking to detect weak signals, receive timely automated alerts, or tap into the AI-powered 5W framework (What, When, Where, Who, How) for crisis management, Digimind has got you covered. The tool also offers robust analytical functionalities, helping businesses fine-tune their content strategies based on current trends, audience insights, and engagement patterns. Key Features: Pricing Two models are available: total monthly mentions with unlimited queries/topics and the total number of queries required per year with unlimited mentions, and demos can be requested. Agorapulse is one of the most comprehensive social media management tools and includes features to help you with brand monitoring across Twitter and YouTube. You can also use it to track unlimited hashtags on Instagram, while its Listening feature will automatically collect public mentions of your Instagram business profile. While it doesn’t crawl nearly as many online sources as most of the other tools on our list, its interface is pretty simple making it easy to identify your parameters for listening. It also lets you assign items to specific members of your team, making it a good tool to consider if you’re working as part of a bigger team. Key features: Pricing: After a generous free 30-day trial, pricing starts at $49 per month when billed annually. It also offers a limited Free plan for individuals getting started. YouScan is trusted by brands such as McDonald’s and Adidas and offers five products in total. Similar to Talkwalker, it also boasts image recognition features. With this feature, you can identify logos in digital media to help you protect the reputation of your brand or measure sponsorship ROI. If you simply want to gather all your brand mentions by means of keywords, you can do that too. Its real-time mention stream gives you access to more than 500 billion historical conversations! Key features: Pricing: For information about its pricing, you’ll need to contact YouScan directly. Unlike Brandwatch and Brand24, BrandMentions is newer to the scene and was only launched at the end of 2017. What sets it apart from many other tools is that it offers more than basic listening. Instead, users are given a comprehensive picture of every mention across the world wide web to make better sense of their online presence. This means that it will also pick up brand mentions on blogs, review sites and any other non-social site in addition to social media websites. All its plans also offer multiple projects which you can use to monitor the social handles of your competitors too. This can serve as a good yardstick to put your brand’s own performance into perspective. Plus, it will give you valuable insight into their target audience (aka potential new customers for you) and how they market to them. Key features: Pricing: Pricing starts at $99 per month after a free 7-day trial. Talkwalker’s top comprehensive features are trusted by brands like Adidas and Duracell. With its brand monitoring, you can get access to mentions across 10 social media sites as well as more than 150 million non-social websites like online news sites, blogs, and forums. What’s more, thanks to its image and video recognition tools, you can also keep track of where your business logo gets used. In fact, it’s the only tool that empowers brands to analyze brand exposure in video. Unlike some of the other tools mentioned on our list, with Talkwalker it’s more difficult to set up the different topics that you want to monitor. Another drawback is that it’s quite pricey. For its listening feature, you’re looking at about $9,000 per year. So, it’s better suited for bigger brands in need of an enterprise-class software solution. Key features: Pricing: Pricing starts at $9,000 per year. With Keyhole, you can track when the name of your brand, its offerings or competitor is mentioned across all the major social media sites as well as millions of other websites. By means of its intuitive dashboard, you’ll also be able to get an overview of data relating to post volume, engagement volume, number of impressions, and reach volume. This basic data will give you a good starting point. It then also takes it one step further to offer sentiment analysis which is useful for competitor analysis. Unlike similar tools, Keyhole also offers hashtag analytics. While it doesn’t relate to brand monitoring, it’s useful for curating content and helping your content reach more people. Key features: Pricing: Enterprise solutions are available. For more information about the pricing and free trial, you’ll need to contact Keyhole directly. Founded in 2012, Mention caters to both agency and enterprise clients. In addition to offering real-time brand monitoring, its software can also be used for competitive analysis, custom insights, and automated reporting. From press articles to review websites, with Mention you can monitor more than 1 billion sources across the web. All in all, it’s a great tool to help you manage your brand’s reputation online, plan your social media content, and engage with your audience. Its interface is super intuitive and the fact that the keywords that you’re searching for are highlighted in yellow makes it even easier to find your way around the software. Key features: Pricing: For individuals who want to dip their toes into brand monitoring, it offers a Free plan. For the ability to track more mentions, its plans start at $49 per month. Hootsuite offers an additional feature, Hootsuite Insights, that’s powered by Brandwatch (another tool on our list). With it, you can stay informed about discussions relating to the key topics, track brand mentions, and monitor the activities of your competitors. Alternatively, if you’re already using Hootsuite for social media management, you can integrate Talkwalker to get important insights conveniently via your Hootsuite dashboard. One of its most useful features is that you can get alerted instantly of any unusual spikes to identify possible customer complaints that can go viral. This makes it a lot easier to get ahead of a crisis. It also offers a personal AI analyst, affectionately dubbed Iris. With this sidekick, you can transform raw data into insights faster and identify important conversations that others might overlook. Key features: Pricing: After a generous free 30-day trial, pricing starts at about $99. For information about Hootsuite Insights specifically, you’ll need to contact its sales team that will be able to confirm the pricing information. Sprout Social offers an advanced listening tool that you can use to listen in on discussions about your brand. It offers five pre-built topic templates that include a Brand Health template that makes it easy to stay on top of public conversations happening about your brand or its products on a curated list of websites from Social Gist and social networks like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Though, it does offer some limitations. For example, you can only listen for your brand name in descriptions of YouTube videos and not the comments too. Also, with Facebook, you can pick certain pages as it doesn’t give you the ability to listen to the whole network. Key features: Pricing: After a generous free 30-day trial, pricing starts at $249 per month. While BuzzSumo is one of the top tools for content marketing, it can also help you with brand monitoring. With it, you can create alerts for mentions of your brand and its products as well as other keywords and topics that can impact your business. This way, you can be the first to respond (or at least very quickly) to prevent a crisis. In addition to tracking the use of your own brand name, you can also use it for competitor monitoring. You can, for example, set it up to receive a real-time notification when one of your competitors gets mentioned online or set up a dashboard to keep tabs on your competitors. Key features: Pricing: While it offers a Free plan, this plan excludes alerts. For the ability to set up custom alerts to track brand mentions and more functionality, pricing starts at $119 per month. If you jump ahead and quickly scan its key features listed below, you’ll see that Ahrefs focuses a lot on SEO. Part of its features, it also includes a Mentions feature that lets you track topics or brand names that are mentioned throughout the web. All you have to do is set it up in Ahrefs Alerts and you’ll receive notifications in your inbox at the frequency that you prefer. What makes this feature useful is that it lets you decide whether you want to look for your keywords in the title of the post, the content of the post or both. However, one con is that it’s not the cheapest tool on the market. Also, while virtually all the other tools offer some form of free trial, Ahrefs offer only a paid trial for seven days. Key features: Pricing: Pricing starts at $99 per month. Meltwater hunts through feeds from the main social networks like Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest and TikTok as well as blogs, discussion forums, customer reviews sites, and online news. What’s more, it also uses AI algorithms to identify when your brand is the point of discussion in thousands of podcasts. Then, to help you make sense of all the data, it also offers social analytics tools. This useful feature comes in handy if you want to identify patterns and trends to help you make better marketing decisions. Key features: Pricing: For information about its pricing, you’ll need to contact Meltwater directly. Awario crawls more than 13 billion web pages each day to help you identify brand mentions. This way, you can offer customer service via social media to build better relationships with your customers. Not only does the information that it collects help you to respond to comments, but it will also help you to gain more insight into your audience so that you can adapt your marketing strategy. You can, for example, use it to identify potential new customers who are currently searching for products or services that you offer and turn these prospects into leads faster. Key features: Pricing: Pricing starts at $39 per month. If you’re searching for a tool to help you with review monitoring specifically, you can also check out Reputology. From property management companies to healthcare organizations, it will monitor reviews about your brand around the clock on places like Facebook, local search directories, and Google. Key features: Pricing: Pricing starts at $110 per seat per month. NetBase Quid offers a range of features relating to brand monitoring that can help you to improve your business. For example, with its Brand Health feature, you can get a better understanding of how consumers and the media view your brand by analyzing customer experience data from any source in real time. You can also use it to keep tabs on brand sentiment over time. With this information, you can see if the perception of your brand is improving or, worse, taking a hit. Similarly to Talkwalker and YouScan, it also uses AI to identify when your brand shows up in pictures. This is a great feature if you want to focus more on user-generated content. Key features: Pricing: For more information about its pricing, you’ll need to reach out to NetBase Quid directly. 1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
2. Sendible
3. Brand24
4. Digimind – An Onclusive Company
5. Agorapulse
6. YouScan
7. BrandMentions
8. Talkwalker Analytics
9. Keyhole
10. Mention
11. Hootsuite
12. Sprout Social
13. BuzzSumo
14. Ahrefs
15. Meltwater
16. Awario
17. Reputology
18. NetBase Quid
