The Ultimate Guide to Harnessing the Power of Organic Brand Mentions

Are you aware of what people are saying about your brand? Organic brand mentions about your brand on the internet can have a have a huge impact on brand reputation. If you have no idea what customers are saying about your business or the internet, or if you have missed social media interactions under the surface, it can leave your business reputation vulnerable.

We all know digital platforms have emerged as a critical part of running any business nowadays, so it is important to make sure to keep a tab on them. By using the right tools, you can easily monitor, analyse, and respond to every single relevant brand mention on the internet. In this article, we will share how to track brand mentions and how to make the most use of them to enhance brand awareness.

What is the brand mention?

Every media mention of your brand online is regarded as a brand mention, and it plays a significant role in shaping your online brand reputation and visibility. In other words, brand mention refers to how many times your brand is “mentioned” or “referenced” on various digital platforms in the form of articles, blog posts, websites, and social media posts. Brand mentions are usually published in the context of positive or negative feedback from customers and other people. Brand mentions can be split down into two categories: direct brand mentions and indirect brand mentions. These brand mentions can be linked or unlinked.

What are types of brand mentions?

Here are some popular types of brand mentions used in digital landscape:

Social media mentions:

These brand mentions refer to those coming from social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and other such platforms.

Forums and communities:

It include mentions on relevant forums and communities

Reviews and testimonials:

This include product or service reviews and mentions on various sites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and others.

Blog post mentions:

This involves brand mentions on various blog posts across the digital space.

Brand mentions can also be classified as direct or indirect brand mentions:

• Direct brand mentions: These brand mentions directly refer to your brand name. These can be in the form of a positive or negative review of your products or a new article about your product launch.
• Indirect brand mentions: These brand mentions involve referring to your brand without mentioning it by name. It may include misspellings of your brand name, references to your products only without your brand name, use of your tagline, etc.

Why do brand mentions matter for a business?

1. Know how people perceive your brand

Brand mentions help to understand how your brand is perceived by people in the digital landscape. By monitoring online mentions, businesses can monitor their online reputation, customer opinions, and the effectiveness of their PR strategies. It will help you formulate the right strategies to build trust among existing and potential customers.

2. Aid your search engine optimisation efforts.

A lot of brands use brand mentions strategically in search engine optimisation to build a reputation for the brand and get a stronger domain ranking. Though brand mention is not a direct SEO factor, it has impact upon your brand reputation and rankings.

3. Discover and engage with your customers

Brand mentions allow businesses to discover and interact with customers. When you respond to the brand mentions by customers, whether they are positive or negative, it creates a good reputation for your brand. It also gives you great insights about your target market.

4. Aids in competitor analysis

Brand mention tools allow you to track what people say about other brands as well. If you want to know how people perceive your competitors’ brand, social media monitoring tools can help you get real-time notifications.

5. Helps in crisis management

Sometimes good businesses can get brand reviews from vague competitors that can have impact upon its reputation. For instance, a faulty product, a rude customer support agent, or an unanswered poor review can diminish your brand reputation. If you keep yourself updated with brand mentions, it helps you take the right step at the right time to preserve your brand reputation.

6. Helps in brand reputation management

Brand mentions can be both positive and negative. While positive brand mentions boost your brand reputation, some negative brand mentions can have a negative impact on your brand image. However, not all negative mentions are bad, and they also help you improve your products and services by providing you insights on improving your offerings and methodologies. Tracking brand mentions is a vital part of online brand reputation management, providing you with a with a real-time look into what people think about your brand.

7. Helps to improve PR strategy

By tracking brand mentions on social media and gathering insights into the conversations happening around your brand, it enables you to swiftly address criticism, make the most of positive feedback, and create a favourable brand image. It also acts as a valuable resource for formulating effective PR strategies.

How do I find brand mentions?

Manual search

To manually search for brand mentions, all you need to do is type your brand name in Google search bars and social media search bars, and it will show you all the places where your brand is mentioned. You need to check results regularly, such as on a on a daily or even hourly basis.

Brand mention tracking tools

Brand mention tracking tools make it easy not just to track everything said about your brand but also analyse and take right actions to enhance your brand image. There are several brand mentions tracking tools available out there. Make sure to consider your budget and needs to pick the right tool.

10 tools for brand monitoring in 2024

1. Google Alerts

If you don’t want to search Google manually, there are a variety of tools that can be used to track brand mentions. Google Alerts is your go-to tool for any kind of mention in the digital landscape. The good thing is that it works great with brand mentions.

To set up Google Alert, you should go to https://google.com/alerts and enter a keyword or key phrase that you want to be alerted about. Before you finalise it, you can click the show option to modify how often you want to get alerts, where you get them, and a lot more.

 Pricing: Free

2. Socialmention

SocialMention.com is a nice free tool to track your brand mentions is socialmention.com. It is an easy-to-use tool for brand mentions that also allows you to narrow down your search as per a specific channel.

Pricing: Free

3. Mention

Mention is another easy-to-use tool to find brand mentions. It provides you with nice graphical results to show the online performance of your brand. This tool allows you to set up alerts when your brand is mentioned online. It is like a comprehensive version of Google Alerts. Though it is not a free tool (plans start at $29/month), it has more extensive features than SocialMentions.com.

Pricing: starts at $29 per month.

Free Trial: 14-day free trial

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite Streams is an easy-to-use paid tool to track brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags on multiple platforms—everything on a single platform. It also shows you your posts and engagements, and you can set an automatic refresh interval, so it is updated on its own. This tool also makes it easy to streamline the process of monitoring and answering DMs, comments, public posts, and mentions.

Pricing: $99–$249+/month

Free trial: a 30-day free trial is available (for professional or team plans).

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a comprehensive web and social media monitoring tool. You can use it to discover everything that is said about your brand online as well as about your competitors. It tracks your brand mentions on social media platforms, news websites, and other online platforms. It also analyses the sentiment of the conversation to understand if brand mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.

Pricing: $41/month, billed yearly

Trial: A 14-day free trial is available

6. Social Pilot

Social Pilot is a globally trusted social media management tool. It not only helps you track brand mentions but also has a full social inbox and auto-posting feature to allow your team to engage with the audience. It also curates and recommends content from various industries.

Pricing: $170.00/mo

Trial: 14-day free trial is available

7. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a brand reputation management tool for large-scale businesses. If you need a lot of global data, Talkwalker is the ideal tool. It also comes with image recognition features that take your mentions to a new level. It allows you to discover mentions via images featuring your logo.

8. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management and monitoring tool for deep and real-time social listening, allowing you to get useful analytics, manage social networks, and create the connections you need by enhancing your brand awareness.

Pricing: Starts from $ 199

Trial: Free trial for 30 days

9. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a robust brand monitoring tool developed exclusively to keep track of brand mentions. It is one of the most popular tools used for managing your online brand reputation. It allows businesses to manage multiple social networks and sources to analyse and measure the sentiment of conversations. It keeps you updated with the latest trends in the market and provides real-time alerts straight to your inbox.

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month.

Free Trial: 7 days

10. Brand24

Brand24 wraps around the entire web to provide you with all mentions of your brand. It also recognizes and discredits the most influential and active authors. The tool is commonly known for its “sentiment analysis” feature that filters mentions based on positive and negative words.

Pricing: Starts from $ 79

Trial: Free trial available

Tips for tracking brand mentions

If you are looking to track brand mentions, here are some tips to help you

1. When you use brand mention tools, they help you select a variety of terms along with your brand name to find brand mentions. For instance, you can search for

• spokesperson names
• online authors
• authors
• product names (e.g., “CRM software”)
• category terms (e.g., “healthcare”)
• And everything else for yourself and for your competitors.
• While your brand term is the first thing that comes to mind to track brand mentions, you should not limit yourself to it. Every brand mention tool comes with a range of keywords to allow you to make a comprehensive search related to brand mentions. All you need is to make good use of those keywords.
• Your potential customer may not spell your brand name perfectly. Depending on the brand name, people use many alternatives. You need to think of different ways to find brand mentions by using different spellings of your brand name.

How do you leverage brand mentions for SEO and online brand reputation management?

Once you have tracked brand mentions, the next steps involve analysis, engagement, and ongoing monitoring of brand mentions for improving SEO as well as for online brand reputation management.

Analyse the brand mentions

1. Sentiment analysis:

sentiment analysis involves categorising mentions based on the sentiment associated with them, such as positive, negative, or neutral. This will help you understand the overall perception of your brand by the people at large.

2. Source analysis:

The next step is to analyse the source from which you are receiving brand mentions, such as social media, news articles, forums, and so on. This will help you prioritise engagement and tailor your strategy for each platform.

3. Topic analysis:

Topic analysis involves analysing what aspects of your brand are being discussed by your targeted audience. It will help you find areas for improvement or new opportunities to grow your brand.

4. Engage with the brand mentions:

Engaging with mentions is essential to maintaining a positive brand image. It is crucial for a brand to address both positive and negative mentions promptly and professionally. Thank those leaving positive reviews and address concerns raised in negative ones.

5. Join conversations:

When it is relevant, participate in ongoing discussions related to your brand. Share your expertise, answer questions, and showcase your brand’s value.

6. Encourage positive mentions:

One of the great ways to gain positive reviews and mentions is to show appreciation for positive mentions by liking, sharing, or retweeting them. This will encourage further positive engagement.

7. Ongoing monitoring:

Constant brand mention monitoring is necessary to stay on top of any new conversations or emerging trends.

8. Refine your strategy:

Based on your brand mention analysis, improve or adjust your strategy in relation to content creation, social media engagement, or customer service approach.

9. Measure progress:

Measuring progress from time to time is important to know if your efforts are bringing the desired results. It is crucial to regularly track things like sentiment over time, brand awareness, and website traffic to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.

By following these steps, you can effectively leverage brand mentions to manage your online reputation, improve your SEO, and foster a better relationship with your audience.

How do I gain organic brand mentions?

As the digital landscape evolves, backlinks alone are not enough to improve your domain authority. It is important that brands prioritise organic brand mentions to stay ahead in the competitive environment.

Here are some tactics to gain brand mentions:

1. Produce high-quality content:

Produce relevant, authoritative, and engaging content to naturally attract brand mentions. Such content may include insightful blog posts, whitepapers, videos, social media posts, podcasts, and more.

2. Content marketing:

Content marketing is a great way to take your brand to the next level. Make sure your content is easily shareable across platforms by including social media buttons and using relevant hashtags. The more people share your content, the more brand mentions you’ll generate.

3. Engage with your audience:

Posting your content is not enough. One must regularly engage with the audience by responding to their comments and concerns. Suck engagement will help you earn positive organic mentions.

4. Host webinars and workshops:

Webinars and workshops are great platforms to showcase yourexpertise and provide value. It leads to increased brand visibility and mentions.

5. Influencer collaborations:

Partnering with influencers in your niche is an effective way to generate brand mentions across various platforms. In a world dominated by social media, brand endorsements by influencers can reach a wider audience. They may also encourage their followers to mention your brand.

6. Public relations:

A well-thought-out PR strategy helps to create buzz about your brand, leading to more media visibility as well as organic mentions. Sponsoring events or launching products are ways to attractattention and mentions.

7. Excellent customer service:

Going the extra mile to deliver excellent customer service is a great way to foster brand loyalty and encourage positive reviews from your customers. When customers are happy and satisfied with your services, they are more likely to recommend your brand and mention you online.

Final Thoughts

Brand mentions play a crucial role in shaping your online presence and brand reputation. By actively monitoring and engaging with brand mentions, you can manage your reputation, identify areas for improvement, and leverage opportunities for growth. You can track brand mentions manually or by using tools that automatically track everything said about your business in the digital landscape. Some of the most popular brand tracking tools are Google Alerts, Social Mention, Mentionanalytics, SproutSocial, Talkwalker, Hootsuite BrandMentions, and Brand24. Once you have tracked brand mentions, the next step is to thoroughly analyse them and take the right action, such as responding to positive mentions with thanks and engagement. Brand mention tools also help you analyse sentiments and take the right action to get the most out of your social media strategy. 

If you want to make most out of your brand mentions, eSearch Logix experts offer link outreach services helping businesses to make connections with relevant websites, blogs, and other online mediums, in turn gaining brand mentions and backlinks to enhance brand’s search visibility and rankings.