Customer Experience 
Online brand monitoring felt cutting-edge a decade ago, but it is now essential. It’s also become much more advanced, incorporating new platforms, tools, and strategies.
In 2024, online brand monitoring goes far beyond reviewing tagged posts on social media channels and Google alerts for media mentions on news sites. It now includes broader digital footprints, including online review sites, video platforms, AI-generated summaries, and even conversational AI interactions.
Why You Want to Take Online Brand Monitoring Seriously
For businesses to stay aware of their brand perception, react quickly to crises, and gather insights for strategy, they must monitor all digital interactions. Whether that’s social media or AI search results, staying on top of mentions is a necessity.
Effective monitoring can help you keep track of brand awareness and online reputation. This may include sentiment analysis or trend detection alongside mentions of your brand name.
Brand monitoring allows you to do the following:
- Understand customer perception: Customers may not always share what they think with you, but they may mention it online. Being aware of this can help you understand how you fit into the overall market and how customers perceive your brand.
- Identify client pain points: Clients may look for solutions or discuss their concerns online. For example, they may stress that they’re looking for a platform with a feature you don’t have. You can leverage this information for product development to stay competitive and improve the customer experience.
- Respond to negative comments and reviews: Brands will usually have negative reviews at some point, but if you react quickly and offer a solution, you can help reduce the impact of negative reviews on your business.
Brand Monitoring on Social Media
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter) play a central role in monitoring brand mentions and customer sentiment. In many cases, social media monitoring tools play an important part in most brands’ monitoring strategies.
Advanced AI tools can monitor not only direct brand mentions but also indirect conversions or hashtags relevant to your brand’s niche or industry. These tools may also analyze the tone and sentiment behind social media posts, classifying them as positive, negative, or neutral.
This analysis offers immediate access to customer feedback, brand advocacy opportunities, and potential reputation threats in real time, allowing you to react quickly. In some cases, it can help you identify and manage a social media crisis.
Tracking Online Reviews
There are several online review platforms, including Google Reviews, Yelp, Trustpilot, and industry-specific review sites like G2 and Capterra. Such review sites can directly shape a brand’s reputation.
The review site G2, for example, combs through reviews and customer feedback to provide a list of a platform’s pros and cons according to its customers. In this case, past customer perception can directly impact whether future customers decide to purchase from you.
Businesses can use automated tools to get instant notifications of new reviews, allowing companies to respond rapidly to both positive and negative feedback.
Keep in mind that online reviews can increasingly influence local SEO rankings, and more weight is being placed on the quality and recency of customer feedback. Google, for example, heavily relies on reviews when making suggestions for local businesses, and customers are also more likely to click on businesses with many recent, positive reviews.
When leveraging review management, you should respond to negative reviews, ideally apologizing and attempting to find a solution. However, you also should report fake or malicious reviews and request their removal to protect your overall brand sentiment.
Monitoring Your Brand on Video Platforms
Monitoring video platforms is becoming more important as video continues to dominate online engagement, especially through platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. AI tools can transcribe video content, analyze mentions, and assess the sentiment behind video reviews or influencer collaborations.
In the example below, an influencer talks about alternative pet insurance they’ve tried for their pets. It would be exceptionally difficult for someone to manually comb through dozens (or even hundreds) of these videos, but AI tools can provide transcripts and analyze the video for sentiment, making it much easier to track how your customers feel.
Brands can monitor not just mentions but also engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments on videos related to their brand. This video monitoring provides deeper insights into audience behavior, brand advocacy, and the overall impact of any influencer marketing campaigns you’re running.
AI Search Result Brand Monitoring
Tools like Google’s AI summaries and ChatGPT offer quick overviews of brand-related search results. They can summarize key content from different articles, reviews, and overall discussions, and they may even provide citations from specific websites.
Brands must monitor AI-generated content on platforms like ChatGPT, where summaries of brand interactions may appear in customer support, research, or content generation. After all, consumers may be using these tools for their own research and decision-making processes.
In the example below, we asked ChatGPT if we should use Turbo Tax in a specific situation (self-employment). ChatGPT explained when it could be a good option but stressed that it may not be suitable if your business finances are complex or if you’re unsure of tax strategies.
Understanding how AI platforms represent your business can help identify any miscommunications or inaccurate summaries that could influence customer perceptions. Turbo Tax, for example, has dedicated solutions for self-employed business owners that the company may feel aren’t properly highlighted in this summary.
The biggest challenges are ensuring AI-generated content is accurate and knowing how to rectify false information presented by these conversational tools. If you wanted to leverage a content marketing strategy for reputation management, you could write blog articles about different competitors or product resources, providing AI tools with new information that could alter narratives.
Brand Mentions on Forums and Message Boards
Brands should monitor various online forums. Reddit is a popular forum with thousands of different subreddits with niche topics, but industry-specific communities and blogs are popular in more segmented markets. Monitoring these platforms for discussions of your brand can provide insights that you may miss if you’re exclusively focused on mainstream channels.
Brands tracking long-form conversations can assess deeper product discussions. In many cases, this is a great way to gather customer intelligence to understand authentic user experiences.
Forums, meanwhile, are less structured, making it much harder for businesses to automate tracking, so a more human-centric approach is required to identify meaningful mentions. A combination of social listening tools and manual search engine assessments may help you better assess your customers’ perception of your brand’s presence.
For example, a quick search in Reddit’s search bar for the brand You Need a Budget revealed plenty of discussions showing that most customers were overwhelmingly happy with the app.
Competitive Intelligence Monitoring
It’s not enough to monitor your own brand across multiple platforms — you’ll also want to engage in competitive analysis.
Monitoring your competition’s online presence — including their reviews, social media engagement, and product mentions — can be invaluable. You can gain insights into industry positioning and customer preferences, and you may even see opportunities to make your business stand out.
Some platforms aggregate analyst reports and press releases to uncover new lesser-known insights, including that a competitor is growing, developing new technology, or working with new leadership. You can even compare social media analytics performance to track customer engagement and mentions.
All this information can help you benchmark your brand’s performance and identify areas for improvement or differentiation.
Monitoring your competitors – Nextiva Social Media and Reviews
The Blind Spots of Monitoring and Tracking
A variety of different tools can facilitate online brand monitoring, including social listening and social media management tools, marketing software, and customer experience platforms. These tools can effectively track social mentions to assess how users feel about everything from your marketing campaigns to your products, but there are limitations to the existing technology.
These potential limitations include the following:
- Conversational AI: Monitoring of brand mentions across AI platforms like ChatGPT is still in development, with accuracy and access being fairly significant challenges.
- Private Communities and Encrypted Channels: Brand mentions in private groups like WhatsApp discussions, closed Facebook groups, or membership-only review platforms are much harder to monitor due to privacy concerns and accessibility.
- Indirect mentions: Conversations that indirectly reference or imply anything about brands without directly naming them are more difficult to track. This may include instances when someone uses a pun to refer to a brand.
- Video-based mentions without transcription: Videos do not always have closed captions or transcriptions, so they can be overlooked or misunderstood by automated tools, limiting visibility into how brands are discussed in video content, including video podcasts.
Grow Your Brand Effectively With Nextiva
Brand monitoring requires advanced and dedicated solutions. Certain types of discussions are easy to track. Social media management tools, for example, will register when customers tag your brand in a post, and social listening tools can track when your brand name is mentioned online.
Other mentions, of course, are more difficult to locate. Plenty of discussions happen behind digital closed doors, including in private groups. And in some cases, people may not mention your brand name outright.
While there are still some limitations around certain types of online brand monitoring, the right tools can help. Nextiva is one of the best brand monitoring tools on the market, offering extensive functionality to help brands unveil where conversations are happening and what customers are saying about everything from your customer service to your pricing.
Nextiva’s social media management suite offers personalized omnichannel management, including the option to listen to conversations across social channels, forums, blogs, custom sources, and more. Get started today.
Personalized Brand Management
Over 70% of consumers turn to social media and review sites before they make a purchase. Become part of your own brand conversations.
