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 brand mention tools (also known as social media monitoring tools, social listening tools, or brand monitoring tools).
These tools are built specifically for finding, tracking, and responding to conversations about your brand, and can help you better interact with your target market, manage your reputation, and improve your brand sentiment. They’ll also help you spot enthusiastic promoters who could be your best advocates for a referral program!
What are the best social listening tools?
Here at Referral Rock, we talk a lot about word-of-mouth marketing and tracking sentiment with NPS software. In this list, we’ll cover the benefits of brand mention tools and a comprehensive breakdown of the top 10 to consider for your business.
1. BrandMentions
Best for: SMBs across all industries
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. BrandMentions successfully changed that.
Top features:
- Brand monitoring: Sends instant email alerts of any mention of your brand (on any site) straight to your inbox.
- Competitor spying: Gain access to your competitor’s strategies, allowing you to identify missed opportunities and see exactly where you stand in the market.
- Reputation management: Know who is using your brand name in conversation, and quickly sort negative mentions from the positive ones to gauge brand sentiment.
Pricing: $79 – $499/month
Free trial? Yes, you can sign up for 7-day free trial with no credit card required
Review score: 4.6 (40 reviews)
Our take: BrandMentions is one of the most affordable tools on this list. It really comes down to whether you want to schedule social posts and monitor brand mentions with the same tool. You can’t manage social posts with BrandMentions, but you’ll save money if you want a focused tool to track brand mentions.
2. BuzzSumo
Best for: SMBs across all industries
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 features:
- Cross-web monitoring: BuzzSumo allows you to see brand mentions, competitor activity, industry trends, and backlinks across the web and different social platforms (Facebook, X, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube).
- Uncover influencers: Find potential brand advocates or influencers with engaged audiences by searching for top sharers and creators in your industry (on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok).
- Content ideas: Use mention trends to spark inspiration for content your audience wants.
Pricing: $159 – $999+/month
Free trial? Yes, there’s a 30-day free trial
Review score: 4.5 (187 reviews)
Our take: BuzzSumo goes beyond your typical mention tracking to share industry trends that can help you guide future moves. Keep track of what your audience says about you and gather dedicated insights to reach future customers with new content, in the same tool.
3. Sprout Social
Best for: Small businesses and agencies
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, real-time listening, providing useful analytics, managing social networks, and creating the connections you need to widen your brand awareness.
Top features:
- Great service: Sprout Social offers each and every client personalized, quick, and reliable support.
- AI-powered listening: Track millions of mentions and conversations in real-time, with no need for boolean; filter searches without sacrificing queries.
- Competitive analysis:Â Track industry trends, competitor trends, and industry gaps to boost your online presence.
- Integrations: Integrate with your social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X, YouTube) to centralize publishing, monitoring, and analytics.
Pricing: $249-$499+/month
Free trial? Yes, there’s a 30-day free trial
Review score: 4.35 (1699 reviews)
Our take: Sprout Social consistently gets high ratings on review sites (and was named G2’s #1 overall software product for 2024). It packs social media management and social listening tools into the same package.
4. Hootsuite
Best for:Â Businesses of all sizes
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 tool, as it alerts you to what people are saying about your brand on social media.
Top features:
- All-in-one platform: Schedule, curate, and manage your social media profiles, monitor social media mentions, and examine detailed analytics about your social performance.
- Detailed brand mention tool: Find and filter mentions by keyword, hashtag, and location, in many different languages, so you can get a true picture of your company’s share of voice.
- 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.
Pricing: $99 – $249+/month
Free trial? Yes, 30-day free trial available (for Professional or Team plans)
Review score: 4.25 (5278 reviews)
Our take: Like Sprout Social, Hootsuite combines social media scheduling with brand mention features. Both receive consistent positive reviews, although Hootsuite’s entry-level plans are more affordable. Check out their features side by side if you’re more flexible about pricing.
5. Mention
Best for: Agencies and SMBsÂ
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 real-time email alerts, you can zoom in on your brand, competitors, and customers to create the perfect marketing campaigns.
Top features:
- Real-time media monitoring: Get live updates about your brand from over a billion sources on the web (including social media and news sites) and uncover new, relevant mention searches with the tool’s “robot assistant.”
- Custom insights: Focus on the metrics that matter most to your brand using detailed filters, and see how impactful each mention is.
- Mention API: Gives brands the power and flexibility needed to handle their own data.
Pricing: $41 – $179+/month
Free trial? Yes, you can start a 14-day free trial
Review score: 4.6 (671 reviews)
Our take: Mention is affordable for all business sizes; all plans let you use sentiment analysis and detailed filtering functionality, and all plans give each mention a score based on its perceived impact to your brand. You even get social media scheduling features within the same package.
6. Brand24
Best for: SaaS, marketing and advertising companies
Brand24 allows you to collect, analyze, and react to every online public mention of your brand to manage your online reputation. 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 channels in real time. Structure precise campaigns to best increase sales and customer satisfaction, based on the data you’ve collected.
Top features:
- Mention tracking with sentiment analysis: See what people say in real time, and analyze the buzz quality and quantity to get to know your customers better. Apply various filters, including geolocalization, post author, number of visits, influence score, or sentiment.
- Discussion volume chart: Instantly check changes in discussion volume and reach to capitalize on positive trends for your brand and respond to brand emergencies.
- AI insights:Â Get GPT-powered recommendations for trends to track and leverage, find the most impactful mentions, and easily filter key data.
Pricing: $79 – $499/month
Free trial? Yes, there’s a 14-day free trial
Review score: 4.7 (313 reviews)
Our take: Brand24 consistently earns high ratings for customer service across review sites, and it’s even been named an AI leader by Influencer Marketing Hub. Many of its features are similar to Mention’s, but Brand24 stands out with more detailed AI features, while Mention has social scheduling. If AI or social scheduling doesn’t matter as much to you, compare these platform’s features and scope of tracking side by side.
7. Awario
Best for: Businesses of all sizes
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 features:
- Real-time mention monitoring: Use Boolean logic to track very specific mentions of your brand or another keyword, as well as use exclude irrelevant mentions. Awario will alert you every time your brand or keyword is mentioned in real time. From there, these mentions can be tagged as positive or negative with sentiment analysis.
- Identify influencers: Mentions are scored based on a user’s reach, so you know how influential a mention is. If a given user is on social media, Awario will also show their number of previous mentions. This makes it easy to find potential advocates.
- 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 repost user-generated content to your brand’s own account.
Pricing: $29 – $399/month
Free trial? Yes
Review score: 4.3 (67 reviews)
Our take: Awario is one of the most cost-effective brand mention tools out there. There doesn’t appear to be any AI features and reviews score it lower than competitors, but not many other tools have instant-reply features to engage people who have mentioned you right away.
8. Determ
Best for: SMBs across all industries
Determ 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 a recorded brand or name is mentioned.
Top features:
- Advanced Boolean search: Find brand mentions and keywords across languages, set up search strings to keep from receiving irrelevant results, and filter your searches based on needs.
- Sentiment analysis: Find out exactly what the public thinks of you with positive and negative mention tags, combat crises, and capitalize on waves of positive feedback. Plus, find out the influence score of each mention.
- Customizable alerts and digests: Set your account to send alerts daily or weekly, with information tailored to your preferences.
Pricing: N/A
Free trial? No
Review score: 4.9 (37 reviews)
Our take: Determ has earned high ratings on review sites for performance, ease of setup and use, and how often users recommend the software. Unfortunately, it’s hard to properly compare it to other options, though, due to the lack of transparent pricing.
9. Mentionlytics
Best for: SMBs across all industries
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 features:
- Social intelligence advisor (SIA): Unique to Mentionlytics, this AI feature gives you actionable, personalized advice to improve your web and social presence. It flags trends, relevant hashtags, competitor insights, possible advocates who share you regularly, and even possible trolls who try to affect your reputation.
- Boolean mention search: Filter your results with as much detail as you want, quickly identify industry trends, and keep a close eye on competitors.
- Sentiment analysis: Analyze your brand mention data according to positive or negative sentiment, in every language.
Pricing: $41 – $399+/month
Free trial? Yes
Review score: 4.9 (31 reviews)
Our take: Mentionlytics consistently achieves high review ratings for ease of use and customer support. The SIA feed is truly the standout feature, as it identifies potential advocates, trends, mention spikes, and competitive strategies in one inbox. You’ll need to pay for at least an Advanced plan to use it, though, as well as to trigger mention alerts in real time.
10. Brandwatch
Best for: Medium-sized to large businesses across all industries
Brandwatch is the world’s enterprise social intelligence leader, empowering many of the most admired brands and agencies including Unilever, Walmart, and Dell.
Top features:
- Brandwatch analytics: Highlights business-critical insights within millions of online conversations, with historical, real-time, and diverse data.
- AI search:Â Iris AI uncovers spikes in brand-related conversations and insights about those mentions’ main themes; no need to create a manual boolean search. Image analysis and auto-segmentation are also included.
- Instant reports: Quickly broadcast insights to decision-makers throughout your organization.
Pricing: N/A
Free trial? No
Review score: 4.1 (267 reviews)
Our take: Although many different businesses use Brandwatch, this tool is more suited for larger businesses, especially since the pricing is not transparent. The AI features are a plus, but other tools also offer AI tools at a more affordable price point.
Brand mention + Social listening tool FAQs
What are some key features of brand awareness 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. Social listening can also help increase customer advocacy.
The main features of brand mention software are as follows:
- 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
What are the benefits of brand mention tools?
Brand mention searches are 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 and can fit nicely into an existing workflow automation.
- 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.
What metrics can you track with this type of software?
Now that you have an idea of the right brand mention tool for your needs, 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 data. 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.
What are good 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 marketing 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 or social 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
Referral 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. It’s best to use brand mention software to find possible advocates, and then referral or ambassador software to mobilize them and
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 accounts, 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 and backlink tools (like Ahrefs), and customer satisfaction survey software (like NPS software).
Customer experience management software (CX tools)
CX software 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.
Use brand mentions to grow your business
There are many tools a marketer 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’re key to growing your business and marketing strategy.
With the right brand mention tools and processes in place, measuring and building brand awareness and reputation can be done pretty easily, and can have a powerful effect on your business success.
And if you’re noticing that customers have a lot of good things to say, consider starting a customer referral program!
