Online Brand Monitoring Explained: Manage Your Reputation
The wellbeing and sustainability of your company means having a close eye on your brand’s public perception. There are more ways the audience can interact about your brand than ever before, but fortunately it has never been easier to map your brand references by online brand monitoring.
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the way different platforms are monitored in order to find out about your brand and analyze what it means. It is about monitoring the brand’s reputation and reception by the general public and the consumer base and targeted demographic.
What to monitor?
You basically want to monitor the largest possible number of sites. If you are a small company or an international one, there are even more platforms to mention about your brand. Communication moves much faster now and you need to keep up. Below some platforms to monitor:
- Online news media
- Online publications and blogs
- Forums
- Social media platforms
- Review sites
What are the benefits of brand monitoring?
The first thing to monitor is your own brand. This key is to watch your brand name, but also other variants and iterations such as acronyms, misprints, and popular words that include the name of your brand (especially if the term may be used for a different purpose), as well as a definition.
- Understand the public reviewing the marketing and networking tactics of the brand.
- Learn how to help create new products, services, or goods using your brand’s perception.
- Spot negative vibes about the brand or falsification or violations of rights.
- Learn how the brand on various channels is viewed.
- Brand monitoring will help you figure out how your brand is being mentioned.
Brand infringers are always looking at brands’ name and reputation to attract viewers. Monitoring enables a company to find infringers that use brand names and domain names that are very much like yours. Commercial legislation is meant to shield customers and brand owners from and it is a means to promote unfair competition and brand monitoring.
Brand monitoring enables the company to respond to a favorable or negative customer opinion, which is generally reflected in social networks, forums and complaints pages. This also helps companies, typically in the form of comparative advertisements and negative feedback, to track competition representations of your own brand.
Brand monitoring also serves to gather knowledge and feedback into a broader variety of practices including market analysis, on themes, keywords or incidents in your company.
What are the brand monitoring tools?
If you’re looking to just start out with brand monitoring, there also a lot of free tools which can get you started.
- Google Alerts (https://www.google.com/alerts)
Free and simple, just add a keyword, you will receive emails about your alerts. You will use this to watch everything from your brand name to currencies. However, it is so basic without any analysis or overviews in the long term.
- Google Marketing Platform (https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/)
Google has a range of other resources and services that are free for you to use to brand monitoring, web analytics and optimize your products. The instruments were now placed under one umbrella. You can build dashboards through its Data Studio to help you visualize your site and search console data.
Google Analytics and the Search Console must be used to see which platforms are being used by websites and what phrases they use to access your site and how they act after they have visited your site.
- Backlink Checker (https://www.seoreviewtools.com/valuable-backlinks-checker/)
Another way of brand monitoring is to see what websites connect to your own website to understand how your brand, products and services have been spoken about. Creating a number of backlinks from reputable sources to your website is important, especially for optimisation of the search engine. Some paying solutions are part of broader frameworks for search optimisation. However, a free tool such as Backlink Checker may be used to begin.
- Social Mention (http://socialmention.com/)
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.
It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
Social Mention currently provides a point-in-time social media search and analysis service, daily social media alerts, and API.
- Brand24 (https://brand24.com/)
Brand24 gives you a lot of detail about your brand, how you see it online, and when and what people think about your brand.
Brand24 will give you some hefty brand monitoring data, such as:
- the volume of mentions
- the sentiment analysis of mentions
- type and number of interactions
- estimated social media reach
- most active locations where your keyword is used on Twitter
- the context of a discussion for your project
- list of most influential authors for your industry niche
- Brandwatch (https://www.brandwatch.com/)
Brandwatch provides robust data analysis and market insight from the opposite side of the continuum of brand monitoring tools.
- Hootsuite (https://www.hootsuite.com/)
Hootsuite also can be used as a brand monitoring tool and gather all the mentions about your brand online.
Set up the social media streams that monitor conversations and predefined keywords.
- BuzzSumo (https://buzzsumo.com/)
The brand monitoring tool provides many features that can help you spot all the relevant mentions, for example:
- keywords and brand alerts
- domain alerts — receive a notification any time new content is published on a given domain
- author alerts — track all content posted by a certain author
- link alerts — get notified any time there’s a new backlink to your website (excellent for SEO purposes)
- personalised dashboard
- real-time notifications
- filters to receive precisely the results you need
- Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/)
In particular, Ahrefs is a tool that provides a far deeper dive in your connection profile. You will see the anchor text and the power of the domain all the links to your account. All these things are very useful for monitoring who speaks very quickly to you and your website. It’s not free unfortunately.
- TweetDeck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/)
A Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement. Reach your audiences and discover the best of Twitter.
What is IP Reputation?
The consistency of your email sending environment is seen by a company IP reputation. A positive IP reputation is a useful advantage and makes e-mail networks decide to send the email to the spam folder. IP reputation can be considered as brand monitoring.
You can trace each email to an IP address and get an IP reputation based on past incidents. In a larger sending environment, IP addresses usually belong to your email service provider (ESP). If an ESP has previously permitted the sending of spam or inappropriate bulk emails with IP addresses in its setting it affects the IP credibility for the ESP. Poor IP reputations will give all consumers in this ESP setting greater bounces and slower deliveries.
How to monitor your IP reputation?
It is also important to monitor your IP reputation for any changes. When you track your IP reputation, it enables you to act quickly to secure your system when necessary. You must conduct an IP reputation lookup to monitor the status:
- Open your message headers to see the actual IP address is used to send over your message.
- Use public IP check tools to see the reputation of your IP address.
- Be sure to do an IP reputation lookup regularly, to monitor for any changes
Brand Monitoring Made Simple by SOCRadar
SOCRadar Brand Monitoring tool to efficiently monitor your online reputation. SOCRadar often detects and aggregates data as your brand is listed in the site and social media.
Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are more than just networking with millions of users including your customers across the world. Threat actors frequently benefit from social media’s popularity by abusing it for cybercrime, fraud, phishing or proliferation of misinformation causing brand reputation loss. SOCRadar’s RiskPrime can help you spot and address these threats in real-time giving you the added visibility and control over social media threats.
SOCRadar Social Media Monitoring
- Fake phishing profiles: Get alerted whenever there’s a new social account created using your brand name.
- APT campaigns: Detect early the APT groups’ activities as well as latest popular cyber threats.
- Brand misinformation: Monitor for nefarious campaigns that is aiming to cause reputation loss.
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