Top Tools to Track Brand Mentions Around the Web

Ivan Filimonov

Digital Marketing Expert at Serpstat

Tracking your brand mentions is a vital part of managing your reputation and the best way getting honest feedback. And tracking website mentions allows businesses to monitor brand reputation, discover customer feedback, and identify opportunities for engagement or improvement. As a SaaS, we take feedback very seriously. 

Using specialized tools to find brand mentions helps businesses stay informed about public perceptions, identify potential PR opportunities, and react promptly to customer feedback. Not only it helps us to improve, tweak and add stuff that helps our clients solve their marketing, SEO and PPC problems, but it also provides means working on brand reputation.

If you are in pressing need of a tool to track your brand and competitors' mentions, sit back, I got you covered. I knocked on few doors with a humble pitch to kindly provide me with free access to the most capable solutions on the market.

Without further ado, here are the top tools that can help you track all important mentions around the web.

Brand24

The free version of Brand24 is a taste of its pro version albeit for just a fortnight. On the plus side, guys from their online chat support were super friendly and helpful providing me with an additional MONTH to try their tool. Another great thing about this tool is that you can set up your project and start in no time.

After you specify keywords, go to the Source tab and switch all relevant places you want to monitor. In a flick, the tool was able to collect 2752 mentions (I opted to collect mentions in all languages)

Mention

Mention's free version allows to track up to 500 mentions per month for up to 3 search terms. Unfortunately, you can't untick social media domains (in case if you want to track mentions just on forums and blogs). And since free version restricts using in-app filters (for same reasons), you're bound to sort out results manually. Another stroke of disappointment is that free version won't let you download results and since the tool doesn't have any online chat support you have to unravel things on your own.

As for results themselves, the tool was able to collect an impressive 243 mentions in a beat.

For this tool to make any sense at all, you have to go with a paid plan straight away, regardless if you like it or not. Luckily there's always a good old refund.

Mediatoolkit

Mediatoolkit is another great tool to get an access to online mentions and to spy on competitors. It has a 14-day trial period that differs from their starter plan, and I'm quoting their cheerful online chat support team on this, in "reports and custom email alerts, as well as statistical data around mention."

Setting up your project and tailoring results to suit your needs can be done by clicking on this gear button:

Because, for some reasons, the tool started collecting all the data for the specified brand, you would still need to go to the settings and change parameters like language, sources if you want to track something specific. But on the bright side, time and source filters were actually usable and among the trackable sources were Disqus and VK.

I was also super happy that the tool allowed me to track as many keywords within my project and exclude as many phrases (minus keywords) as I wanted to.

Mentiolytics

Mentionlytics was one of the most comprehensive tools in terms of UI/UX. Its Google Analytics-styled dashboard leaves no place for wondering what's what.

The trackable period - checked; Channel sources - checked; Country source - checked; Language - checked. I can go on, but it's worth trying once and see for yourself.

The tool also provides a trial in which you can track up to 5 keywords and have 10k mentions for 14 days and real-time email report. Which is no small feat considering that their startup plan includes just 3 keywords and 1k mentions to track for a month. The number of results found by this tool was consistent with the other tools which kinda says that crawl bots work with the same efficiency.

Awario

Awario is very comprehensive and intuitive mention tool with various trackable sources on board in the 14-day trial version. After setting up a campaign, I get the amount of data consistent with other tools. It offers simple and effective filtering options by sources and date along with flexible alerts.

Dashboard provides a very useful presentation of where most mentions come from, distribution of sentiments, top influencers and general mentioning trends over the tracked period.

The tool does a great job segmenting top influential sources for Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Reddit, but no Twitter or other social domains.

Honorable mention

F5Bot

F5Bot is a free little social media monitoring tool that will send you an email whenever your brand is mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobster. Just adding a new label to your email won't hurt.

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