7 Ways Brand Monitoring Software can Help Your Organization

There are numerous brand monitoring options. Brand monitoring is built into some social media analytics tools, or can be added as an option. Some popular dedicated brand monitoring options are

Mention,

Brand Watch, and

Trackur. There are also free brand monitoring tools out there the most popular of which are

Social Mention
for doing research, and

Google Alerts
which will generate notifications when it discovers a mention of the keywords you define. We’ve tried the free tools, as well as a number of the paid tools, and have found the paid tools to be easier to configure, better at assigning sentiment, and collect more mentions from more sources.

Most brand monitoring software will find mentions in a number of places on the Internet ranging from social networks, to blogs, to news sites, to other sources. If you’re evaluating social monitoring software you should review the sources they monitor and choose a solution that monitors the places where your customers (or prospective customers) hang out. Most brand monitoring software has the following features:

Tracking and reporting of mentions: Based on a keyword or a group of related keywords you define.
Alerting: Many brand monitoring tools can be configured to send you notifications when mentions happen. You can often configure these alerts to happen immediately via text message or desktop notification, or as email messages at daily, weekly, or some other interval.
Sentiment assignment and tracking: Most brand monitoring software attempts to assign a sentiment to a mention. Positive (if something good was said about the brand), negative (if something bad was said about the brand), or neutral if something was said that the software can’t assign emotion to. You can usually assign your own sentiment to mentions for later analysis as well.

Many brand tracking services offer other features such as integration with other analytics tools, or task assignment for responding to mentions, enhanced options for response, download of mentions, reporting, and even mobile apps. Almost all of them have pricing tiers based on the number of alerts (keyword groups) you wish to monitor, and or the number of mentions you receive each month. The more alerts you want to configure, and the more mentions you need to track, the higher the price. Pricing starts at about $30 per month (Mentions lowest tier for 3 alerts and 500 monthly mentions), and many more options become available in the $100 price range.

Now that you know what brand monitoring software is let’s how it can help your brand.

1. Monitor your brand (and get alerts)

It’s no surprise that this is the biggest benefit – as stated earlier, brand monitoring software helps you find what people are saying about your brand, its products, and its services. But let’s drill into this for a minute. You may have social media publishing or analytics tools, such as Hootsuite, that give you information or show notifications when people interact with your posts or content. Brand monitoring software shows you what people are saying outside of your social media pages and content.

If someone writes an article about your brand on their blog, brand monitoring software will tell you about it.

This allows you to see what’s being said about your brand all over the Internet. More importantly, it allows you to respond and participate in conversations you may never have known were going on. Having a dedicated tool for this gives your community managers a single place to look for and interact with mentions. Those daily or weekly mention roll-up emails can also provide an extra failsafe to ensure your brand has responded to everything it needs to.

2. Measure Sentiment

Measuring sentiment is an important part of social listening. Tracking the trends in overall sentiment is one way to measure the effectiveness in the following areas:

Content: You might hear someone recommend your YouTube channel because it has great how-to videos, and that may validate your YouTube content campaign. Conversely, you might hear that your instructional videos don’t address certain topics, or aren’t in-depth enough. That’s not something you want to hear, but hearing it gives you the chance to adjust your content strategy to address the issue.
Community interaction: You might hear how people have interacted with your brand online, and what they’ve liked, or not liked, about the experience. People appreciate it when brands pay the right kind of attention to them. You can use this information to train community managers and refine your community interaction. That should your community happier, leading to better customer relationships.
Customer service: Similar to community interaction, you can see what people are saying about your customer service (both online customer service and other types of customer service) and use the information to improve speed and quality of service. It can also help you create better self-help content that you can post online.

3. Perform social media audits

Every few months you should audit your social media activities to get the big picture of how well you’re managing, growing, and utilizing your social media presence for marketing, sales, and service. Brand monitoring tools aren’t essential to that, but they sure make it easier. In addition to seeing sentiment, you can break out mentions about your content types (such as images, videos, long-form posts, and so forth), content topics, campaigns, products, services, and the brand overall. You can see what’s working, potentially find ways to duplicate successes in other areas, and adjust marketing and content strategies to produce more of the content your audience likes and interacts with.

4. Respond to mentions

As stated earlier, one of the biggest benefits of brand monitoring software is the fact that it gives you the ability to participate in conversations you might never have known were happening. Each type of mention – positive, negative, or neutral – provides a different opportunity for the organization:

Positive sentiment mentions can be broadly shared, or collected for use as social evidence. You can also engage with fans to create brand advocates.
Negative sentiment mentions give you the opportunity to show the social community that your organization cares, and to change hearts and minds. You may not be able to make everyone happy, but the fact that you’re trying will impress many. Taking the high road, and providing helpful, thoughtful, and reasonable responses will show the quality of your brand and help you win fans.
Neutral sentiment mentions offering a variety of opportunities to engage. You can restate value propositions, provide additional information, or show customer evidence, to try to turn neutral sentiment positive. While the initial sentiment may have been neutral, the engagement

Top 7 Tools to Stay On Top of New Social Media Marketing Trends

In conclusion, here are some of our top picks for digital marketing tools to help you stay on top of social media marketing trends.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media monitoring tool that is considered to be the standard in the industry. It is a highly popular freemium platform that allows users to manage their marketing on all major social media platforms. In addition to providing a variety of excellent monitoring tools, it also enables you to schedule posts on your various social media platforms and assign tasks to members of your social media team.

Sprout Social

Sprout social is popular because it not only has post-scheduling and monitoring tools but also has a great set of analytics features. These features include being able to see your share of voice by platform, post-interaction over time, and impressions divided by campaign. The tool is useful for businesses whose social media resources are spread across several marketing initiatives and platforms.

Keyhole

The Keyhole suite of tools is designed to help you monitor your social media activity. The AI-driven account recommendations can help you determine which hashtags to target and when to post for maximum engagement. This website provides a great selection of tools that are useful for influencers, including the ability to find other influencers in your field, compare them, and measure how successful they are.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence platform that can be used for content marketing, paid and organic campaigns, and online brand management. The social listening feature of this platform gives you the ability to personalize your experience by creating customized dashboards. You can use these dashboards to track and analyze your brand mentions, as well as to discover new opportunities to connect with your target market.

Netbase

Netbase is one of the lesser-known but more advanced social listening tools. It uses AI-powered Natural Language Processing to help you make more sense of conversations concerning your brand from a single glance at the dashboard. You can analyze your competitor’s conversations, hashtags, social posts, emotions, and behaviors at a granular level. This is great for helping you find nuances and missed opportunities.

AlsoAsked

AlsoAsked finds the most similar questions to the one a user has just asked. Changing the language and region setting will help you get more accurate results from this tool. AlsoAsked can help you figure out what content to put on your website based on what people are searching for. This tool not only provides you with questions that users could be looking to answer but also gives you an overview of the suggested intent of the subject. This will help you better position your content to provide value in a specific segment of a customer’s conversion journey.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool that can be used by marketers and business owners to identify trending topics based on social media search activity. It can help you understand what topics are most popular and in demand so that you can create content that appeals to your audience. Google Trends can be a helpful tool when you’re planning your content calendar for the future. If you want more people to click on your content, make sure it is about topics that are currently trending. This will also result in more social shares.

Tips for effective social media monitoring

Once we understand the importance of social media monitoring, here are some ways to make sure we are effective in our efforts.

Know your Competitors

Although you don’t want to imitate your competitor’s strategy, it can be beneficial to keep an eye on them and the online conversations surrounding their company. This will give you insight into the types of conversations and trends that are common in your industry.

Monitor your closest competitors’ social media platforms closely, specifically looking at the content their customers engage with positively and negatively. This will give you valuable insights into what kind of content and interactions your own customers may respond to favorably or unfavorably.

When a company makes a public mistake, it can seem easily avoidable afterward, but you can’t take chances with it. It can be helpful to look at what your competitors are doing on social media and use that information to improve your own social media presence.

Spread the Word

Although monitoring social media activity is often seen as the realm of the marketing department, this shouldn’t be the case. The things you learn about your customers through social media monitoring should be shared throughout your business to ensure a better overall customer experience.

If your competitors have a user-friendly UI on their mobile app, you might want to say this to your company’s designers and developers to help them update it in the future.

While social media monitoring is often the responsibility of the marketing team, it is important to share this information with other departments that could also benefit from it.

Word-of-mouth marketing

By responding to all mentions and requests on social media, you can build trust with your current customers, encourage prospects to reach out to your brand, and increase engagement rates on all social media platforms.

Additionally, social media monitoring allows you to track user sentiment, which can be useful in understanding how your brand is perceived. Social media monitoring can help you find user-generated content and track user sentiment to understand how your brand is perceived. In other words, you get an authentic testimonial with little to no effort.

A majority of consumers (76 percent) say they base their purchase decisions on what other people have said about the product, according to Hubspot.

You can improve your customer service by contacting customers across social media platforms and gathering positive reviews. You can also identify any issues with your product or service that customers have shared on social media.

Final Thoughts

This introduction to social media monitoring should be useful to you as you manage your brand online and do social media marketing.

It can be difficult to identify useful patterns from all the noise on social media, but with the right tools and resources, it can be very beneficial!