Today, brand mentions on diverse social media platforms have become the word-of-mouth for the modern age. They serve as compelling barometers to improve your company's visibility and brand reputation. The main role of these mouth publicity methods is to increase visibility into opportunities for brand amplification and thereby serve as a crucial part of social media listening. Many businesses also consider brand mentions as powerful indicators of their brand status, equity, and health.
Our blog post will thus delve deep into a few questions, i.e., ‘what are brand mentions,’ how they work/help, and how they benefit companies or online businesses to stand out in today’s competitive digital landscape.
Overview of Brand Mentions
The first question that strikes everyone’s mind is ‘what are brand mentions?’ Brand mentions are instances when a brand’s name, its products, and/or services are referenced by internet users in diverse online portals/mediums. These include social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, forums, blog contents, reviews, and news websites. Such mentions may be direct, like highlighting the brand name, or indirect, i.e., by referring to a specific brand by highlighting its slogan or product feature instead of naming the brand outright.
Types of Brand Mentions
Based on the overview, online businesses may categorize the brand mentions and their roles under the following categories-
Social Media Mentions
Social media mentions take place whenever users talk about a brand on diverse social media platforms. These include, but are not limited to, Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others.
Role of Social Media Mentions
Almost every one of us today uses some form of social media site. Besides, every brand is curious to know what its prospects or customers often discuss. In this way, social media mentions may be a medium through which the target audiences of a company/brand read what other people say about it. Other than that, social mentions influence the AI recommendations and Google rankings. Based on discussions on social media, AI and search engines find your brand as worth mentioning for recommendations and place it on the top page of various search results.
PR Mentions and Blog Mentions
When different types of media outlets, like industry experts and bloggers, discuss or write about your brand, it refers to PR mentions. Moreover, blog brand mentions take place when your created content on products, services, or your brand is referenced in any other blog post. It includes both a small, brief description with a hyperlink to your website or an in-depth discussion related to your product offerings.
Role of PR and Blog Mentions
Both PR and blogs possess a relatively high credibility based on the experts’ opinion and well-researched content. Accordingly, your business’s target audience and search engines may give a relatively high value to PR or Blog Mentions.
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Forum and Community Mentions
Forum and community mentions are the other two informal types of brand mentions. Here, people discuss your brand on diverse online communities or forums, including the most popular Quora and Reddit.
Role of Forum and Community Mentions
Both forums and communities are vital brand mentions, and companies must monitor those channels regularly. The reason is that potential customers/prospects check on communities or forums to collect information related to their interested brands. A few forum members may ask any question related to specific tools or products, while others recommend in niche discussions. In both cases, brands often pop up in a negative or positive mention.
Reviews
Reviews on Google and other reliable media are a few small descriptions/mentions made by the customers. These include reviews on e-commerce platforms, like Amazon, reviewing platforms, Google reviews, and a few industry-specific or app store-based review platforms.
Role of Reviews Brand Mentions
Internet users/buyers often check online reviews, because these reviews may influence your website’s rank or your brand a lot. In other words, reviews provide you with a complete picture of the significance of your brand mentions, as 75% of consumers regularly read reviews, and most of them expect brands to reply to them.
Why Track Brand Mentions for Online Businesses
Regardless of the type of brand mentions, they are important from the perspective of online marketing. It is especially useful in the social media listening process. Now, another question that comes is, ‘What is social media listening?’
For this, we should say that it is the process used by many online marketers to monitor and analyze the brand mentions in broader conversations. In other words, brand mentions and social media listening are used to identify the ongoing trends, understand public sentiments, and manage the brand’s reputation.
Based on the obtained information, companies may gain actionable insights for market analysis, customer engagement, and strategic decision-making activities. Other benefits of brand mentions are as follows-
Reputation Management
Brand mentions are both positive and negative. Many of them have vital roles to boost your brand/company’s reputation, while others may spoil it if you leave them unaddressed. Luckily, advanced brand monitoring tools help businesses and marketers to track online conversations, reviews, and social media posts in real time. In this way, one can manage the negative mentions and reinforce the positive ones to create a healthy public perception and brand image.
Social Proof
Tracking a few vital mentions highlighting the videos, quotes, testimonials, or articles related to your brand serves as social proof in action. Such organic endorsements further build public trust and influence sound purchase decisions. Indeed, marketers must use brand mention tools to automatically get the respective proof and attach it to their PR reports with relevant metrics, like engagement, reach, and sentiment.
Customer Trust and Perception
Brand mentions give valuable insights into the perception of customers about your online business without conducting extensive research. By tracking mentions across diverse social media platforms, review sites, and blogs, you may understand your customer sentiments and their trust levels better.
Crisis Management
Setting up alerts to monitor the brand mentions online helps companies in crisis management as well. Any sudden spike in negative mentions or surge in volume on social media accounts highlights reputational risks in advance. By doing so, marketers gain control of the narrative before the story becomes viral and protect their brand reputation.
Help in Search Engine Optimization
Search engines today consider brand signals to rank the online business. Hence, regular mentions of your brand across diverse platforms, without links, contribute a lot to the EEAT, i.e., Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. EEAT today plays a vital role in improving the organic search ranks.
Moreover, both AI and Google search engines analyze the frequency with which a brand displays in news articles, discussions, and social media to check credibility. Accordingly, brand mentions may boost the brand authority, drive a huge organic traffic, and improve Google and other search rankings.
How to Monitor Brand Mentions Manually
Online businesses and marketers adopt two major techniques to monitor their brand mentions for social media listening. These include the following-
Manual Search of Brand Mentions
Searching different websites and social media manually for relevant keywords serves as an effective method to track brand mentions. These include a few major networks, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (now X), and other popular review sites and forums. Regular checking of such media lets marketers identify brand mentions and get involved in customers’ conversations.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an effective tool used mainly to save valuable time spent on tracking mentions manually. One can create alerts for their brand names and related relevant keywords. Google Alert sends an email notification every time your brand is mentioned in search results to simplify the tracking and monitoring process.
Tracking Brand Mentions Easily with Phyllo Social Listening API
Regardless of the social media listening or brand monitoring method used, it has a common and big problem, i.e., data fragmentation. Every platform, whether it is YouTube, Facebook, X, or blogging sites, possesses its unique data format, API, authentication methods, and compliance rules. In this situation, a company needs to create a scalable solution to accomplish the objective of brand mention tracking. Accordingly, marketers need to set up and maintain unique integrations for several social networks. To overcome the issue, many experts have started using the innovative and advanced Phyllo Social Listening API.
As an innovative social listening API, Phyllo resolves the issue of data connectivity by transforming the complexity related to multi-network data aggregation into a highly scalable integration point. Also, Phyllo Social Listening API provides unified data streams for developers to design powerful social media listening features directly in the internal systems or applications.
Conclusion
Brand mentions have crucial roles in shaping the online presence and the brand reputation. They contribute a lot to brand visibility, awareness, and credibility by providing valuable insights into the customers’ preferences and sentiments. However, manual brand monitoring is tedious and costly.
Here, the key is to go with the Phyllo Social Listening API to gain a unified and reliable stream of diverse user-generated content. The API integration also lets businesses form a high-fidelity and durable system to track both direct and indirect mentions and stay at the forefront of the conversion. Therefore, the combination of API and a proactive approach for brand mention tracking and adapting themselves quickly to dynamic market demands boosts customer satisfaction and drives revenue growth.
