Day after day, consumers post their opinions on their social profiles about the products or services they consume. And not only that, but also about your brand. Thousands and thousands of conversations about companies take place on social networks. Whether they are positive or negative, it is extremely important for companies to be able to keep up to date with their reputation. There is no better way to do this than with brand monitoring.
What do we mean when we talk about brand monitoring?
We refer to brand monitoring when we talk about the process of monitoring different channels in order to find the mentions of your company and be able to evaluate them. Whether they are positive or negative.
Having knowledge of all this information gives you the opportunity to be able to react on these mentions. It can help you to achieve a good reputation or to manage possible future crises. As well as, the opinion of your customers about your products or services.
What to monitor
You can monitor as many channels as possible. Whether you are a small company or a multinational, you can find a lot of ratings on online platforms. Communication is now advancing by leaps and bounds, so it is extremely important to keep up to date.
Some of the channels or areas with which you can do brand monitoring are: online publications such as blogs; broadcast media; social networks; print media, such as newspapers; or forums.
What to track about your brand
The first thing that comes to mind is to think that any company is interested in tracking its mentions, but there are other premises to consider. It is a reality that consumers do not always talk directly about your brand, not knowing this can lead you to error. We explain what things can be interesting to track.
Brand and product mentions
The first, if not the most important step in tracking your brand is to make sure when customers are talking about your company or your products. We are talking about direct mentions. In fact, they can often be the most important and useful.
Mentions of your employees
Monitoring the conversations around your company can go a long way in helping you to understand whether what is being said about your brand is positive or negative. Whether your employees are influencers in their field or not, what your staff is saying about your company can get you publicity.
Inbound links to your website
Many people refer to your brand without the need to name it directly. That is why monitoring inbound links to your website is essential to avoid losing references to your company. This is in addition to the SEO benefit of being mentioned in other blogs or forums.
Influencers and industry-related publications
It goes without saying that knowing in detail the industry you belong to is very important, and with it, the conversations that take place. You have to know the industry trends to know if your strategy includes them. The latter can improve your reputation or cause your company to be left behind.
One thing you can’t lose sight of is press publications. It will help you to be able to prevent possible future damage by association; as it can happen with, for example, a crisis. If there are companies in your sector that are going through public scandals, this can also splash you.
Brand tracking tools that can help you
Since there are many tools that can help you in monitoring your brand, we are going to expose the ones we consider the most important.
Google Alerts
This tool is fast and easy to use. Just enter a keyword and you can receive emails every time it is used on the Internet. It is quite a versatile option, as you can use it to track anything and not just your brand. The disadvantage is that it falls a bit short: it only provides mentions without having a general long-term analysis to support the tracking.
Google Search Console
Google gives you the opportunity to track inbound links to your website. This tool is free and has a simple setup. Still, it falls short when it comes to sorting and analyzing links. It can be a good option if you use it in conjunction with additional data on your website obtained on search terms and rankings.
Ahrefs SEO tool
This tool gives users a deeper dive into their link profile. With it you can see all the links coming into your website, the anchor text and the strength of the domain. This option is very useful to easily find out who is talking about your brand online. Although it is not free, it is worth it.
Atribus Reputation Management
That’s right, our tool for active listening to online conversations, performs all the management of your brand’s online reputation for you. In real time you can control what people are saying about your company in a very simple way.
With Atribus and thanks to brand monitoring you can track the mentions that consumers make about your business and the subsequent analysis of the data extracted. This helps you to build strategies that differentiate you from the competition and to manage possible future crises. It also gives you the opportunity to find out which content or product has had the greatest impact on your audience.
Track print media with LexisNexis
A no ser que desee destinar parte de su plantilla a que lean todos los periódicos, resulta una muy buena opción contar con herramientas como LexisNexis. Esta puede ayudarte a rastrear las menciones sobre tu empresa en miles de publicaciones y, a diferencia de algunas de las anteriormente mencionadas, analizar los datos.
