16 Best Brand Mention Tools to Track Your Reach

Have you ever wondered what people are saying about your brand? You can track each time someone mentions your brand, as well as your overall reach, with special brand mention tools.

Today, we cover the benefits of brand mention for your brand, how to evaluate which brand mention tool is best, and a comprehensive breakdown of the top tools to consider for your needs.

(Or skip straight to the top brand mention tools below.)

What are brand mention tools?

Brand mention tools are exactly what they sound like – tools that help you listen and keep track of what’s being said about your brand online and on social media platforms. While there are many different ways someone can do this, brand mention tools (often called brand awareness or social listening tools) are often the easiest and most effective.

It’s software built specifically for finding, tracking, and responding to conversations about your brand, and can help you better interact with your target market.

Key features of brand mention tools

Brand mention tools help any company monitor just how far word about their brand has spread, and where their brand stands in the competitive landscape.

We list down a few main features of brand mention software below:

• Tracks and creates alerts for all mentions of your brand in real-time across multiple platforms
• Tracks what people are saying about your competitors, so you can better position your brand to capitalize on opportunities where your competitors fall
• Tracks mentions of keywords relevant to your brand, so you can enter the right conversations
• Analyzes how your brand is performing online based on your mentions data
• Monitors your brand’s reach and how people are engaging with your brand

Benefits of brand mention tools

Brand mention is typically targeted toward anything said about a brand online, which doesn’t come directly from the brand itself.

Even the most well-known brands are focused on getting to the top of people’s minds in a positive way. In other words, they know the importance of generating brand mentions and awareness. Brand mention tools are a vital part of this brand awareness and reputation management strategy.

• If a brand isn’t paying attention to what people say online and fueling the fire, so to speak, they won’t know how to consistently deliver what people want. What about your brand do your customers love, and what do they think you should improve on? Listening to brand mentions will give you the inside scoop.
• Brand mentions are a good gauge for the sentiment surrounding your brand. How do people feel about your products and services?
• With real-time data, you can catch the glowing mentions as they happen. This allows you to instantly thank the people supporting your company, as well as repurpose the mention into user-generated content.
• On the other hand, catching negative sentiment (whether true or untrue) allows you to act quickly and keep the negative news from spreading.

Alternatives to brand mention tools

Maybe brand mention software isn’t what you’re looking for. These other tools help you increase brand awareness and manage your reputation, but they have important differences from brand mention tools.

• Brand analytics tools: Analyze what times are best for engaging with your audience. For example, they might pinpoint the best times for posting to social platforms, running campaigns, sending emails, when users are most active, etc. These might even be able to inform you of user demographics, most-used hashtags, and interactions with your brand. Note that some brand mention tools also include brand analytics features.
• Social media management tools: Queue social media posts in advance for automatic publishing, and monitor how your posts are performing. Again, some brand mention management tools (like Hootsuite) offer features like these, but social media management tools are still a distinct category. Some examples of social media management tools that don’t track mentions include Storyheap and Tailwind.
• Influencer marketing software: These tools help you find influencers, or short term representatives of your brand, to talk about you. They also help you track and manage influencer campaigns, and communicate with influencers. They often have brand mention tracking features, but these features are focused on tracking what specific users (the influencers) are saying.
• Brand ambassador software: These tools help you find and manage long-term representatives of your brand. This category somewhat overlaps with brand mention software. After all, brand mention software can help you find your biggest fans on social media, based on the number and content of their mentions (then, you can potentially recruit them as ambassadors). However, brand ambassador software also helps you manage and track ambassador campaigns, which brand mention tools don’t usually do.
• Referral marketing software: This software motivates your customers to share your brand with their friends, through a formalized referral program that simplifies and incentivizes sharing. Yes, it lets you track how many people share your brand through the referral program, and yes, it helps you increase brand awareness. But it’s not brand mention software because it doesn’t track what people are saying about you across the internet.
• Affiliate marketing software: Affiliate marketing programs are used by companies to compensate individuals or other companies (their affiliates) for sending them new customers. This is typically done through a link that the affiliate places on their sites, social media, and other platforms.
• Reputation management tools: Brand mention tools fall into this broader category, but there’s much more to the story. Other brand reputation management tools include review management software, SEO tools (like Ahrefs), and customer satisfaction survey software (like NPS software).
• Customer experience management software (CX): Comprehensively monitors all aspects of a customer’s journey, by collecting customer feedback, purchase history and other insights from each individual customer, for easy monitoring of their satisfaction. In a way, it’s one step up from customer satisfaction software. Qualtrics is one example of customer experience software.

Our evaluation criteria

Brand mention tools: The comprehensive list

Using our evaluation criteria, we put together a list of the top brand mention tools. The table below lists down all the software we cover in this article. Click the tool to read more about the company and its most popular features below.

Note: The software is not listed in any order of rank or recommendation. Our aim is to put together a selected source of brand mention tools, and give a clear picture of all the available options.

Iconosquare

“Simplify your social media management”

Iconosquare is a powerful Instagram analytics and social media management tool. It allows you to manage multiple social profiles, monitor brand mentions, share your performance with quick and easy reporting, plan and schedule your content in advance, and much more.

Founded in 2011, Iconosquare is a pioneer in the Instagram analytics field and has been an official Instagram partner since 2016. It currently lists over 25,000 clients, including notable brands such as National Geographic, L’Oreal, Hilton, and H&M. If you’re looking to track your brand mentions, you’ll want to check out their best-in-class monitoring features.

Top 3 features

1. Amazing analytics: By providing detailed insights on content performance and audience engagement, Iconosquare can help grow your social media presence, provide benchmarks against competitors, track the effectiveness of selected hashtags, and more. The Scheduler feature also helps to find the most optimal time to post on Instagram.

2. Monitoring: Find and instantly respond to your audience’s mentions with the tool’s Conversations feature. It enables you to track all your photo, caption, and comment tags in one place, as well as compare your brand to competitors by monitoring multiple competing accounts.

3. Performance reporting: Produce branded PDF reports of your performance with a click of a button! Send reports straight to your inbox or share directly with your clients.

Brandwatch

“Monitor 95 million online sources to see what people are saying about your brand – and take action.”

Brandwatch is the world’s enterprise social intelligence leader, empowering over 2,000 of the planet’s most admired brands and agencies including Unilever, Walmart, and Dell.

The company has made two acquisitions to date – PeerIndex (2013) and BuzzSumo (2017) – and was bolstered by its merger with Crimson Hexagon (2018).

Top 3 features

1. Brandwatch analytics: A feature that highlights business-critical insights within millions of online conversations

2. Brandwatch audiences: Ability to optimize targeted influencers, specified content, and paid social campaigns

3. Vizia platform: Allows you to broadcast insights to decision-makers throughout entire organizations

BrandMentions

“Every Mention, Counted”

BrandMentions is a web and social listening tool, that appeared on the market from a personal frustration: the incapacity of accurately monitoring brands and competitors. There was no tool on the market that would send daily notifications about any brand or product, as soon as someone was talking about them online.

Top 3 features

1. Brand monitoring: Sends instant alerts of any mention of your brand and your market straight to your inbox

2. Competitor spying: Gain access to your competitor’s strategies, allowing you to identify missed opportunities and see exactly where you stand in the market

3. Reputation management: Know who talks about you, and quickly sort negative mentions from the positive ones

BuzzSumo

“BuzzSumo gives you insight into what content is working, and the influencers amplifying it”

BuzzSumo allows brands to discover their most shared and liked content across social platforms. Thanks to its advanced search engine, brands can easily figure out which pieces of content are resonating with their audience. It allows you to search up to 12 months of data, which makes it easy to determine the changes and content that have helped your brand most.

Top 3 features

1. View all social networks: BuzzSumo allows you to see shared activity across all the major social networks

2. Advanced filtering: Find the most shared content and filter the content by type

3. Content curation: Discover interesting content that you can share directly with your audience

Sprout Social

“Real people, real brands, real connections”

Sprout Social is a social media management and monitoring software that helps brands find and form real connections with their audience. The Sprout Social suite is perfect for deep listening, providing useful analytics, managing social platforms, and creating the connections you need to widen your brand awareness. Over 25,000 happy customers from all different industries trust Sprout Social.

Top 3 features

1. Award-winning service: Sprout Social offers each and every client personalized, quick, and reliable support

2. Streamlined everyday tasks: The platform provides customizable workflows to optimize performance and save valuable time

3. Smart inbox: The ease of real-time brand monitoring and the ability to track direct messages

Best Company

“Thousands of customer reviews. Hundreds of detailed data points. Our independent research will help you find a company you can trust”

Best Company is an online review site and reputation management tool that provides unbiased data to consumers to help in their buying process. It also supplies businesses with tools to manage their online reputation and improve brand awareness. For businesses in particular, it offers tools to compare their brand with others in the industry, respond directly to consumer reviews, and improve lead generation.

“Online review management, especially in an age where online presence is so vital to a brand’s success. If consumers are searching for your brand and are being met with negative feedback, that’s going to deter a lot of potential customers from using your services.

“Many review sites allow you to respond to customer reviews on their site, which demonstrates to consumers you care about the customer experience. Responding to bad reviews especially shows consumers you care about rectifying bad experiences and righting wrongs. No brand is perfect, and it’s doubtful your brand awareness will be perfect. However, if you take the time to manage your online reputation, you can use it to improve and amplify your brand awareness strategy.” says McCall Robison of Best Company.

Top 3 features

1. Online reputation management

2. Review generation

3. Lead generation

Netvibes

“Everything you care about online – in one place”

Netvibes makes it easy for you to customize and monitor all the things you care about. The platform allows you to do several things, including follow your social networks, receive alerts for breaking news, or read articles on your preferred topics.

By capturing a variety of information and being able to analyze the data, you can better understand the impact of your decisions and focus on opportunities that drive your business forward.

Top 3 features

1. Personal corpus: Listen to the sources you trust so you can focus on what matters

2. Robust dashboard: Control your apps and devices by customizing and programming the dashboard to suit your preference

3. Faceted exploration: Filter all data by author, date, location, language, company, or more

Mention

“Monitor your campaigns anywhere online. Scour the web, social media, and more for powerful market insights”

Mention offers real-time media monitoring to give yo live updates about your brand. The platform allows you access to monitor over one billion sources daily, including social media, forums, blogs, and other sources on the web. With Boolean alerts, you can zoom in on your brand, competitors, and customers to create the perfect marketing campaigns.

Top 3 features

1. Real-time media monitoring: Get live updates about your brand from various sources on the web

2. Custom insights: Ability to define and focus on the metrics that matter most to your brand

3. Mention API: Gives brands the power and flexibility needed to handle their own data

Buffer Reply

“Social media engagement made easy”

Buffer Reply is an all-in-one team inbox, which makes it easy for all teams to communicate and respond to social conversations. The platform lets you see everything you need to know about the particular person you are talking to, helping you provide personalized responses and build great relationships.

Moreover, Reply gives you actionable data and easy-to-read reports on a variety of key metrics so you can improve your engagement across social platforms.

Top 3 features

1. Slack integration: A useful integration allowing you to easily send new support requests directly on your Slack channel.

2. Export reports: All data and reports can be exported in CSV format

3. Integrate with other dashboards: Reply’s API easily integrates the platform data into your existing dashboards

Brand24

“Get instant access to online mentions, grow customer satisfaction and sales”

Brand24 is a social media monitoring platform that allows you to collect, analyze, and react to every online public mention of your brand. By tracking these mentions, you can analyze which exact channels generate the biggest buzz for your business.

The tool also helps you in interact with your customers through your social media profiles in real time. With the collected data, you are able to structure precise campaigns to best increase sales and customer satisfaction.

Top 3 features

1. Mentions feed: A list of mentions with detailed data, which allows you to see what people say and give your response in real time

2. Sentiment analysis: Analyze the buzz quality and quantity to get to know your customers better. Brand24’s platform allows you to apply various filters, including geolocalization, post author, number of visits, influence score, or sentiment

3. Discussion volume chart: The platform provides an intuitive representation of changes in discussion volume and reach

Media Toolkit

“Monitor online mentions of your brand in real-time”

Mediatoolkit is one of the easiest to use media monitoring and analytics tools. It gathers information from millions of sources all over the web, and sends users a notification in real time when the particular brand or name is mentioned.

Top 3 features

1. Unlimited users: Unlimited seats per account

2. Advanced Boolean search: Set up search strings to keep from receiving irrelevant results

3. Custom alerts and digests: Set your account to send alerts daily or weekly, with information tailored to your needs

Mentionlytics

“Intelligent Social Media Monitoring. Access mention insights. Find influencers & sales leads. Grow your brand’s reputation”

Mentionlytics is a social media and web monitoring tool that lets you track mentions for your brand from all over the web. Intelligent insights are a unique feature of Mentionlytics, helping you find lead influencers in your industry, trending topics in your niche market, and real-time customer feedback. Plus, all data can be exported in a PDF or Excel file, or even through their Mentionlytics app, which you can access on the go, regardless of your pricing plan.

Top 3 features

1. Social intelligence advisor (SIA): Unique to Mentionlytics, this feature gives you actionable, personalized advice to improve your web and social presence. This includes finding the best days to post, best-performing hashtags, etc.

2. Boolean mention search: Filter your results with as much detail as you want

3. Sentiment analysis: Analyze your brand mention data according to positive or negative sentiment, in every language

Awario

“The web is talking about your business. Find these conversations and join in.”

Awario is a brand mention tool that scores brand mentions as positive or negative, lets you set up alerts based on specific criteria, and informs you of a user’s reach and number of previous mentions. The platform offers robust customer service and support, through email, a help center, guides, video tutorials, and a dedicated account manager (for higher-level plans). All this is guaranteed to give you a user experience that’s as smooth as possible.

Top 3 features

1. Real-time mention monitoring: After you input your brand name and other relevant keywords into Awario, it will alert you every time your brand is mentioned in real time. From there, these mentions can be tagged as positive or negative, and scored based on the user’s reach. If a given user is on social media, Awario will also show their number of previous mentions.

2. Robust searches: Use Boolean logic, you can track very specific mentions of your brand or another keyword, as well as use exclude irrelevant mentions.

3. Instant engagement: Reshare or reply to mentions straight from Awario. This is a great feature for responding immediately, whether you want to comment or simply reposting user-generated content to your brand’s own account.

Hootsuite

“Manage all your social media marketing in one place”

Hootsuite is one of the most well-known social media management tools. It allows you to schedule, automate, and track your social media messages across a wealth of social profiles. Hootsuite is also considered a brand mention and social listening tool, as it alerts you to what people are saying about your brand on social media. Notable companies, such as the World Wildlife Fund and Accor Hotels, rely on Hootsuite to manage their brand mentions.

Top 3 features

1. All-in-one platform: Schedule, curate, and manage your social media profiles, monitor brand mentions, and examine detailed analytics about your social media performance

2. Detailed brand mention tool: Find and filter mentions by keyword, hashtag, and location, in many different languages

3. Customized integration: The app’s add-ons let you perform even more mention monitoring, including the ability to monitor reviews. Over 250 integrations help you streamline processes and pass data across your suite of tools.

Keyhole

“We help agencies measure the impact of their social media and influencer campaigns.”

Keyhole monitors brand mentions, campaigns, and events, as well as gives you “deep insights into key trends & conversations happening right now.” It collects everything people are saying across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, news sites, blogs, and forums, and allows you to respond right away. Keyhole also makes its powerful API available, which gives complete flexibility when monitoring mentions.

Top 3 features

1. Advanced mention tracking: Its top-quality hashtag tool allows you to track hashtags and mentions, as well as see the sentiment behind mentions at a glance

2. Social analytics: In-depth, real-time tracking of user engagement and reach across your social platforms

3. AI campaign prediction: As the only tool of its kind, the platform helps predict how hashtags are likely to perform over time

Socialbakers

“One solution for all your social media marketing. No matter the size of your challenge, we have you completely covered.”

Socialbakers is an all-in-one social media platform that covers research, content scheduling, analytics, mention tracking, influencer management, and social customer service. Big names like National Geographic, Samsung, and Walmart trust Socialbakers for their social media strategy, brand mention, and tracking needs.

Top 3 features

1. AI research: The tool’s AI uncovers insights into your audience, including their social media habits, content interests, and social voices they trust

2. Fully customizable brand mention tool: With powerful AI, you can find, tag, and label the exact mentions however you want

3. In-depth sentiment analysis: Track changes and trends in sentiment over time, from the level or individual posts all the way to campaigns. Users can instantly see how their audience perceives the brand as a whole.

Using metrics to measure results and track success

Now that you have the right brand mention tools, you need to focus on what you’re going to measure to track brand awareness and sentiment. You will likely find a variety of items to measure, or at least both qualitative and quantitative. Remember that many brand mention tools measure more than just mentions!

We’re going to go over a few of the most common metrics to measure with brand mention tools:

1. Brand mentions

Brand mention tools give you valuable insight and can provide you with a variety of information that can be used in your strategy to build brand awareness.

This is also important because it lets you see what people are really saying about you, and on which platforms. All of which can help you make changes as necessary and gain insight as to which platforms you can focus on to bring in leads.

You’ll want to track your number of brand mentions overall, but you’ll also want to monitor the percentages of mentions that are positive, neutral and negative (sentiment analysis). And of course, you’ll want to see who mentions you the most, and which people who mention you have the greatest reach.

One of the more common ways outside of using one of the tools described above is to use Google Alerts, which allows you to track your brand mentions or a preferred keyword across all social media platforms.

2. Shares

A good quantitative measure is to determine how often your content is being shared. You’ll have the opportunity to see which blog posts work best for your audience. Therefore you can create more content that follows a similar flow.

You can see this by adding a share bar to your posts, but you can also track this type of information with an analytics tool.

3. Social media reach

There are a few tools out there that help you track your social media reach. As you can imagine your social media reach has a huge impact on your overall brand awareness. As your reach determines how many people may see your content.

This measurement considers your number of followers. For example, a follower who has 500 followers of their own is able to help expose your brand more than a person with just 50 followers. So if you have a ton of followers who have a high following of their own, you have a much better chance of having a good organic reach.

4. Social engagement

If you are active on your social channels, you will likely also have a good social engagement. Measuring the interaction levels of your followers is easy and helps you see what kind of content they like seeing.

Likes, comments, retweets, shares, etc. are all ways to track social engagement. Some of the tools will even help you keep tabs on which post had the most engagement.

5. Site traffic

Site traffic should be obvious – this is what you hope that brand mentions and awareness eventually lead to, and it allows you to put a number on the level of interest in your brand. Monitoring this traffic allows you to see if there are changes in your overall brand awareness. If you find that there is a decline in traffic, it may indicate changes needs to happen. Or you can see if the decline correlates with any new campaigns or recent changes you have already made.

Wrapping things up

There are many tools you can use to monitor brand mentions and sentiment. That works in your favor because measuring brand awareness, and managing reputation, can be complex, but they are key to growing your business.

If you have the right brand mention tools and processes in place, however, measuring and building brand awareness and reputation can be done pretty easily, and can have a powerful effect on your business success.