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.
Here at Referral Rock, we talk a lot about brand awareness and reputation strategies – which led us to create this article on exactly how to track these brand awareness and reputation efforts.
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.
What are brand mention tools?
Brand mention tools are exactly what they sound like – software 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 social listening or social media monitoring tools) are often the easiest and most effective.
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.
Our evaluation criteria
Which brand mention tool is right for you? We’ve evaluated the tools on this list with a number of criteria, to help you decide:
| Evaluation criteria | Description |
| Industries | What type of business or industry is a brand mention or brand monitoring tool best for? |
| Pricing | How much does the software cost? What different plans are available? Are you required to commit for an entire year, or are monthly plans available? |
| Free demo or trial | Does the company offer a free trial or demo period for you to try out the software before purchase? For how long? |
| Review score | How do existing users of the brand mention tool rate the software? Based on an aggregate score from top review sites, our rating is out of 5 stars and indicates how many people were included in the software review.. |
| Social media channels | Does the brand mention software cover all social media channels, or does it specialize in monitoring mentions only on selected platforms? |
| Key features | What features make this brand mention tool stand out? |
14 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.
| Brand mention tools | Price | Demo/Free trial available | Platforms | Review score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iconosquare | Starting at $49/month | Yes | Instagram, Facebook | 4.3 (111 reviews) |
| Brandwatch | Request pricing | Yes | All | 4.1 (267 reviews) |
| BrandMentions | Starting at $99/month | Yes | Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Wordpress, and more | 4.6 (40 reviews) |
| BuzzSumo | Starting at $79/month | No | All | 4.5 (187 reviews) |
| SproutSocial | Starting at $89/month | Yes | All | 4.35 (1699 reviews) |
| Mention | Starting at $24/month | Yes | All | 4.6 (671 reviews) |
| Buffer | Starting at $60/year | Yes | Twitter, Facebook, Instagram | 4.35 (15 reviews) |
| Brand24 | Starting at $49/month | No | All | 4.7 (313 reviews) |
| Mediatoolkit | Request pricing | No | All | 4.9 (37 reviews) |
| Mentionlytics | Starting at $43/month | Yes | Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube | 4.9 (31 reviews) |
| Awario | Starting at $24/month | Yes | All | 4.3 (67 reviews) |
| Hootsuite | Starting at $49 | Yes | All | 4.25 (5278 reviews) |
| Keyhole | Request pricing | Yes | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube | 4.2 (52 reviews) |
| Emplifi | Request pricing | Yes | All | 4.1 (110 reviews) |
Iconosquare
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.
| Industries | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Review score | Social media channels |
| Small businesses, social media agencies, enterprises | $49-$99/month; enterprise plan also available | 14-day free trial | 4.3 (111 reviews) | Instagram, Facebook |
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
| Industries | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Review score | Social media channels |
| All | N/A | Demo | 4.1 (267 reviews) | All, but best for Twitter |