Advanced brand monitoring even includes AI-driven categorization. It can automatically tag mentions as they come in with topics like “customer service,” “pricing,” “feature X,” and more. This way, you can filter to see everything about a certain issue quickly and contextualize your data.
Another helpful analysis is demographic or geographic insights. Some tools tell you the demographics of those talking about you or where in the world conversations are spiking.
For a global brand, knowing that the most positive buzz is coming from Europe while negativity is rising in North America can inform targeted responses.
Remember, analyzing sentiment and context is meant to help you determine your next move – it’s not just data for data’s sake. If sentiment around a product is dropping, dig in to find out why, then address the underlying issue or adjust the messaging.
If a particular campaign got people excited (a high volume of positive brand mentions), identify what made it work and bring some of that magic to future campaigns.
Simply put, you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and brand monitoring provides that measurement of how people feel about you.
Engage and respond
Monitoring without action is like eavesdropping on a conversation and then walking away. The true power of brand monitoring comes when you use it to guide your future decision-making.
This has two main parts: responding to individual mentions when appropriate and making strategic decisions based on insights.
For individual comments or messages, it’s important to have a workflow where your team can quickly respond, especially on social media.
For this reason, many brand monitoring platforms integrate with social media management tools to allow you to reply directly or assign the mention to a team member.
For instance, if someone posts a complaint on social, your monitoring dashboard can send that message to your support team to respond via your official account. You might thank the user or reshare it if there's a shout-out or praise.
A friendly, timely response ensures no one is left hanging, showing the rest of the online community that your brand is actively listening and caring. Brands that feel more human in their communications are more likely to earn customer loyalty.
This is where Brandwatch Social Media Management comes in handy. It’s a tool designed to help you not only schedule and publish content but also manage incoming mentions and messages across platforms.
It includes features that will help you efficiently respond to or join the discussion from a centralized inbox. By uniting listening and engagement, you ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Beyond one-on-one responses, you should also feed these insights back into your business.
Brand monitoring might reveal, for example, that customers love a competitor’s new feature and are asking why your brand hasn’t done the same. That insight should be shared with your product and PR teams so they can consider a response (maybe a similar feature or hint that you're working on something).
Or you might find a niche community discussing a particular way to use your product that you hadn’t considered. A smart brand might engage that community with more information or even develop a marketing campaign around that idea.
Let the data guide you. The most successful brands are those that listen to their customers and pivot or make changes to their strategy accordingly.
Monitor competitors and industry trends
We touched on competitive intelligence earlier as a benefit; as a practice, it’s an integral part of a brand monitoring strategy.
Set up brand monitoring for the names of your key competitors and their major products. This way, you’ll receive the same kind of alerts and insights about their brand as you do for yours.
If their campaign goes viral (positively or negatively), you’ll know. If their customers are loudly complaining about a new policy change, you’ll see it. This information is incredibly useful for context – it helps you understand where you stand in the market conversation.
By keeping tabs on public sentiment around competitors, you can spot weaknesses or unmet customer needs that your brand might fill.
Social media is like having a window into your competitors’ focus groups: customers publicly share pain points and feature requests that savvy brands can use to differentiate.
For instance, if consumers complain en masse about a rival product lacking a certain feature, your team can proactively emphasize that feature in your offerings – seizing a market gap.
It’s also worth monitoring general industry keywords and trends. Such social listening will alert you to hot topics among your target audience. It might even help with trend spotting – being the first to pick up on what consumers are starting to care about.
Companies are increasingly trying to use predictive analytics on social data to catch the next big thing before competitors do. If you see a sudden uptick in conversations about a new topic or concern, that’s a chance to create content around it or address it in your strategy.
The trick is to be proactive, not just reactive, and trend-spotting through social listening offers that strategic edge.