What is a brand mention?
Brand mentions are basically references to your brand or product, which come in a variety of forms. Most often, they appear in customer reviews, blog posts, news articles, social media, and so on. These instances can be helpful for companies trying to understand what their customers are saying about them.
However, a brand mention does not equal a direct link, so these mentions don’t always allow users to go to your website right away. However, most mentions still provide enough information for users to find the products or services you are offering online.
Why monitor brand mentions?
Essentially, you need to monitor your brand mentions to understand what sort of experiences people have with the product(s) you offer or promote. This can help you improve your offering(s), mitigate negative feedback, turn one-time customers into brand ambassadors, and keep your brand’s reputation under control. But that’s not the only reason you would want to diligently track brand mentions.
Every time someone recognizes your brand on the web, whether in an article, customer review, or social media post, you get noticed. This, in turn, brings organic traffic to your website (or anywhere else), which increases your chances of generating sales and improving your rankings in the search results.
Naturally, in the face of competition, marketers also resort to paid methods of boosting brand mentions. However, beware that Google gives preference to pages with organic growth/activity and doesn’t favor shortcuts. This is why it is so important to monitor brand mentions and naturally increase their number.
How to monitor brand mentions
Monitoring brand mentions can be a tedious and overwhelming task, especially if you are a well-known brand. Luckily, there are a few resources that can help automate the process. What’s more, you can even set up an alert about brand mentions, which will include most common misspellings. Pursuing typo errors is a regular practice implemented by major brands to drive organic traffic, seize search engine placements, and protect their names.
Good old Google is perhaps the most classic and straightforward way to find brand mentions. Google’s search bar is a reliable tool with which you can find who mentioned your brand and where. However, if you are planning to extract more than ten search results, this process can be quite labor intensive, unless you use a few tricks.
First, we recommend increasing the number of SERPs you get for your query. Search for Chrome plugins that will help you extend Google’s search engine with an infinite scroll (e.g. you can try Infinite Scroll or Scroll it!). Google is set to show a maximum of ten results per page by default. So, we advise that you adjust Google’s search settings and increase the “Results Per Page” up to 100 pages. This will also diminish the chances of receiving warning messages about suspicious activity from your computer from Google.
The next step is to extract all the URLs that lead to your brand’s mentions. There are some tools that can come in handy. With the help of Chris Einsworth’s Google SERP Extractor or Citation Labs Link Prospector, you can get a clean list with all the discovered links.
Google Alerts
Another easy brand mentions tool is Google Alerts. To create an alert, simply enter your brand name or relevant keywords. You will receive notifications into your mailbox. We recommend creating a separate email account for this purpose so that you can keep your inbox tidy. You can specify how often you want to receive the alerts, from what kind of sources, and more.
This tool has a few limitations. For example, you might be experiencing a delay. Sometimes, it takes a few days for the alert to be reported. Next, even though Google is using its own database, it might be missing some results. There is also a limit on how specific you can be when setting up your query. However, the biggest advantage of Google Alerts is that it is absolutely free. You can go a long way using this tool.
Tweetdeck
With Tweetdeck, you can easily monitor social media mentions on Twitter. Within Tweetdeck’s interface, you can create multiple columns that will reveal content that is important to you and your brand. For instance, you can set the different columns to display your brand’s mentions, likes, and the latest Tweets that include a specific hashtag.
Using Tweetdeck, you can refine your search results by specifying what kind of Tweets you are looking for. You can filter the various columns by Tweets with images, Retweets, or simply Tweets that contain a specific word combination. What’s more, you can set the alert to notify you about Tweets appearing in a specific location or about Tweets with a certain number of Retweets.
This becomes especially handy when your brand has been mentioned by industry leaders or profiles with a massive following. Reacting on such brand mentions in a timely manner can heavily support you on the public relations front. You can get these and more advantages from using Tweetdeck free of charge. All you need is a Twitter account.
Mention
With this tool, you can track social media mentions across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Mention allows you to monitor millions of conversations online in real-time. What’s more, you can also engage in the discussion directly from Mention’s app, which is super convenient.
Mention allows you to translate the acquired intel about your brand mentions into insightful graphics and high-quality reports. This makes it easy to analyze your marketing efforts and seamlessly share the results with your teammates. You can set a specific date and time when you would like to see these reports appear in your mailbox.
Mention has great built-in filters as well. You can sift through tons of content by clarifying which keywords, websites, companies, and even competitors you want to gain information about. Plus, Mention works with an influencer score. This feature helps you see how influential the person or brand leaving a comment about your business is.
Pricing:
- Solo Plan: $25/month – Single user & up to 5,000 mentions
- Pro Plan: $83/month – Unlimited number of users & up to 10,000 mentions
- Pro-Plus Plan: $167/month – Unlimited number of users & up to 20,000 mentions
- Company Plan: from $450/month – Unlimited number of users & 100,000 mentions and more
- You can try a free plan and track up to 1,000 mentions for a limited time in single-user mode
- Bonus Tip: Mention offers discounts for non-profit organizations!
Talkwalker Alerts
Used by more than half a million users, this platform positions itself as a better alternative to Google Alerts. Talkwalker hunts for brand mentions across the entire web, including websites, news pages, blogs, and forums. Unlike Google Alerts, Talkwalker catches brand mentions from social media platforms as well. You will receive consolidated alerts about your brand name, events, keywords, and more directly in your inbox.
Additionally, Talkwalker prioritizes sources with your brand mentions according to their level of engagement, so you can receive only the mentions that have an impact. Using Talkwalker Alerts is free, but premium features are available for a fee.
Pricing:
- Listening Plan: from $9,000/year
- Information about the Analytics Plan & Research Plan is available upon request
- No free trial period is available, but you can request a free demo for Talkwalker Alerts
Awario
With this social listening tool, you can be sure that none of your brand mentions will go unnoticed. Awario will gather alerts from multiple sources, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, news sites, blogs, and even YouTube.
Working with Awario is pretty simple. Just enter your keywords, including common misspellings of your brand, to set up an alert. You decide how often you want the reports to be delivered to your inbox (on a daily or weekly basis).
What’s great about Awario is that you can set up the search and exclude negative keywords. It’s a timesaver for companies that use a common word as their brand name or share a name with other businesses. Let’s say you are working for Apple and you want the search to exclude fruits or other terms that are unrelated to your business. This feature will help you keep your notifications clean and on point.
Just like Mention and Talkwalker Alerts, Awario lets you identify influencers. This will grant your business opportunities to create lucrative collaborations and strengthen your social media presence. With Awario’s free trial, you can test the tool for 14 days to make up your mind.
Pricing:
- Starter Plan: $24/month – Single user & up to 30,000 mentions
- Enterprise Plan: $74/month – Up to three users & up to 150,000 mentions
- Pro Plan: $249/month – Up to 10 users & up to 500,000 mentions
Social Mention
Via Social Mention, you can receive updates about brand mentions in a single dashboard supported by easy-to-interpret infographics. Social Mention supports your analytics by running your brand mentions through several filters. Namely, the tool estimates each brand mentions’ strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.
Strength shows how often your selected keyword has been mentioned. Sentiment lets you determine how your brand is perceived online by calculating the ratio of positive and negative reviews. With the passion score, you will be able to see how likely it is that someone will repeat a mention about your brand. Meanwhile, reach allows you to see the level of influence of your brand mention’s source.
Social Mention might be not the most user-friendly tool out there, but it is completely free and provides all the essential features you need to kickstart managing your brand mentions.
How to get brand mentions
Here are some tips to help you boost your company’s exposure, improve brand mentions via SEO, and ultimately drive traffic to your business.
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is a content marketing technique that involves writing a blog post on a third-party website to promote your own brand and obtain a backlink. Be smart when choosing websites to publish on. Ideally, you want to appear as a guest blogger on websites that your target audience is most likely to visit. Think of thought leaders, industry experts, influencers, websites, and blogs where you’ll most likely draw the attention of your ideal customer.
For getting the most out of guest blogging, check out the guide to guest blogging in 2021 on our blog. You will learn best practices as well as the do’s and don’ts of guest posting, including how to avoid being penalized by Google and other common pitfalls.
Social campaigns
A powerful social media campaign can also help boost brand mentions. Most social networks have in-built advertising tools to help marketers reach bigger audiences. For instance, via Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can run ads on both Facebook and Instagram. Linkedin, Twitter, and YouTube have a similar interface for managing ads as well. It won’t take long before you understand how to make your content visible across multiple social media channels.
Interviews
Interviews are another great way to generate organic growth for your brand. With the increasing popularity of YouTube channels, Instagram livestreams, and podcasts, it’s now easier than ever before to make your brand visible. Consider reaching out to people whose content you resonate with and offer to share your story and expertise.
Reviews
Customer feedback is king when it comes to building your brand’s reputation. Reviews, in most cases, are the first thing that new customers look at while considering establishing a relationship with your brand.
A product or service with few customer reviews is almost as bad as a brand with negative reviews. Make sure that you encourage customers to leave reviews after having an experience with your brand. You might as well consider rewarding your audience with certain bonuses for taking the time to write a review. Also, make sure that you don’t leave negative customer reviews unnoticed and respond to them properly.
How to turn mentions into leads?
We recommend monitoring your brand’s mentions on a regular basis, which will allow you to spot opportunities for building links right away. If you have a new mention on a reputable site, consider reaching out to the site owner directly and ask to include your link.
Another way to generate leads is to work on reputation management. As discussed earlier in the Reviews section, the more customer-centric your organization is, the more likely your customers are to trust your brand. Trust here equals more business opportunities.
An additional tip is to analyze the most popular search queries associated with your brand. Let’s say that the most common search queries you see are “how much” or “price”. This should be a signal for your design team to make information about your pricing more visible on your website, which, in turn, might help generate more leads.
Monitoring brand mentions is essential when you need to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Look at the changes of query searches and the intensity of your brand mentions to determine whether your marketing tactic works. This will determine which bloggers bring you the most leads and which platforms your audience is most likely to resonate with.
Monitoring brand mentions for business growth
No matter how big your business is today, monitoring brand mentions is key to growing your brand and building a loyal following. Choosing the right software and establishing a regular check-in routine will help you stay in control. Once you get the hang of it, monitoring brand mentions becomes fun and gives you a chance to connect and collaborate with like-minded people!
