The best brand monitoring platforms for modern marketers

In 1992, brands had many fewer ways to reach audiences, and audiences didn’t have as many ways to recommend or criticize brands. Things were simpler for marketers, but at the same time, it was more difficult to recognize when customers were disgruntled—and more difficult to course-correct. 

Today, brand monitoring platforms make it much easier for companies to understand what consumers are saying about their products and services. Through channels like social media, brands can communicate directly with customers, and by paying attention to conversations and sentiment, brands can quickly detect problems before they develop into full-blown crises. 

Some questions to consider in evaluating and choosing a brand monitoring platform: 

• What is brand monitoring? How is it different from social listening or traditional consumer insights? 

• What are some of the most popular brand monitoring platforms? What capabilities do they offer? 

• How can marketers evaluate and select a brand monitoring platform? What are the right questions to ask? 

Brand monitoring becomes more complex as the media landscape splinters and platforms proliferate. From social media platforms to review sites to conversations that happen by chance in comment threads, people discuss preferences and problems related to brands constantly. 

Let’s take a look at what defines brand monitoring, some of the best available tools and practical criteria for evaluating and deploying brand monitoring platforms.

Forbes defines brand monitoring this way: 

“Brand monitoring refers to tracking and analyzing a brand’s online presence across multiple channels. It reveals where and how often the business is mentioned across social media, news articles, forums and review sites.” 

Brand monitoring brings together social listening, media monitoring and sentiment analysis along with other aspects of audience research. It puts what customers are saying front and center and enables both crisis detection and management and improved engagement. 

Comprehensive brand monitoring encompasses more than collecting information. Qualtrics defines it slightly differently compared to Forbes: 

“Brand monitoring is the act of collecting and measuring mentions of your company or brand across as many channels and touchpoints as possible—with a view to turn them into useful data.” 

Simply collecting the data isn’t sufficient for brands to act. Brand monitoring requires analyzing, measuring and also applying the information. Similarly, brand monitoring is more than social listening, though social listening is one component.

Along with social listening, a brand monitoring platform tracks mentions across: 

• Websites

• News publications

• Forums

• AI search 

Although it may seem like the internet is one big sea of commentary, like the real ocean, it’s actually full of different pools and areas where different kinds of people congregate. Monitoring conversations on TikTok will yield different results compared to monitoring mentions on news publications, for example. 

To gain a clear and complete picture of how your brand is being perceived, you need a brand monitoring tool that tracks and analyzes mentions across a variety of channels. But, that leads to a different problem. 

AI capabilities

The deluge of information cross-platform monitoring can produce can be overwhelming, which is one reason AI-enabled brand monitoring is essential. Even if you have an entire team dedicated to brand monitoring, it would be nearly impossible to keep up with the number of conversations happening in the ocean of the internet. AI, though, can keep up with all of those different sites and voices. 

Besides just keeping up, AI can also analyze the waves of data and provide an overall rating so that you know if people are generally feeling positive, negative or neutral about your brand. Advanced monitoring platforms can even determine if negative mentions are negative due to anger or sadness associated with your brand. 

Many brand monitoring platforms have published lists of the best brand monitoring platforms—usually with their own product listed as the best, of course. Take a look at the chart below. The top row is the company publishing the list, and the columns show the top 9 brand monitoring platforms according to each company.

As you can see, there’s both overlap and a surprising amount of variation. For example, Meltwater appears in four out of five lists, but Keyhole and Ahrefs only show up in one list each. 

Making things even more confusing is the fact that all of these lists include fairly long explanations of why each platform is included—meaning the “best” one depends on what you need, your budget and other considerations. Since your budget and the size of your organization are probably big factors in your decision making process, we’re going to consider three platforms based on budget tier and whether they work better for mid-market or enterprise companies. 

Brandwatch 

Some of the key features offered by Brandwatch include: 

• Social listening

• Custom dashboards and data visualization tools

• Sentiment analysis

• Trend detection

• Influencer tracking

• Image analytics

• Automated alerts

• Integrations with other platforms such as Salesforce, Slack, etc. 

The platform offers comprehensive, flexible brand monitoring, but it could be expensive for a small team or a start up with a small marketing budget. Thanks to the integrations, it could be better for enterprise-level organizations.

Meltwater

Most brand monitoring platforms offer similar features. Here are some of Meltwater’s: 

• News and social monitoring

• Trend analysis

• Competitive benchmarking

• Influencer discovery

• Custom reporting

The dashboards on Meltwater are customizable, and it has a robust API interface, which means you can connect it to many other platforms. The platform doesn’t make it easy to understand their pricing structure, but they do offer several different plans and they are labeled specifically for enterprise, small and medium business and agency.

Sprout Social 

Sprout Social, as the name indicates, began as primarily a social listening platform. Over time it’s become a brand monitoring platform with features such as: 

• Collaboration tools

• Advanced scheduling 

• Competitor activity reporting

• Engagement metrics

• Trends reports

• Detailed dashboards

• Chatbot integration

Sprout Social is more transparent about their pricing than many other brand monitoring platforms. They offer standard, professional and advanced plans at $199, $299 and $399 per month respectively, as well as custom plans for enterprise operations.

Zappi Brand Health Tracker

Taking on a different approach to the more familiar platforms we covered above, Zappi now offers a brand tracking solution that is built for how marketers work today — in a real-time, continuous, connected insights platform. 

Some of the unique features include: 

• Real-time visibility into awareness, consideration and mental availability, so you can spot trends early and act when it matters

• A Brand Health KPI Snapshot that gives you a point-in-time view of your brand’s health

• Dashboards powered by Ehrenberg-Bass metrics and inspired by Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow”

• Ability to track up to 15 brands in real time and more

Traditional brand tracking wasn't built for today's reality. Zappi’s Brand Health Tracker changes that, delivering continuous insights designed for speed, scale and modern marketing budgets.

Making a decision about any business software tool can be difficult because so many platforms offer overlapping features and services. You need to consider your needs before you begin to evaluate platforms. 

For example, what kinds of coverage do you need? Does it matter if you get real-time alerts or not? How important is sentiment analysis and accuracy? How much cross-channel integration do you need? What other platforms need to be integrated? What kinds of reports do you need, and how often?

As you begin to evaluate platforms, you may want to create a checklist to help you compare what’s available to what you need. Here’s a sample:

• Does the platform offer a plan that fits your budget? 

• Is there a free trial? 

• Does the platform include AI features? 

• Does it offer API integrations? 

• Are your distribution channels covered? 

• Is there a shared inbox, or other workflow features that fit your team’s needs? 

• Are the reports and dashboards clear and easy to understand? 

• What kind of support is available, both during onboarding and after?

Reading about what brand monitoring platforms can do is one thing, understanding what happens in real-world situations where profits and even jobs are on the line is an entirely different thing. The following three examples show the difference brand monitoring tools can make during a crisis, for campaign lift and for new technologies like AI search. 

Crisis detection and management

Finding examples of brands dealing with crises that lead to reputational harm is not difficult. One that happened recently, and that was fueled at least in part by social media, was the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) run in 2023. SVB went from profits of $200 billion to collapse in an astonishingly short time. In fact, depositors and investors withdrew $42 billion in a single day. 

Although there was some evidence that the bank was being poorly managed, there wasn’t any other additional risk. Yet, social media fanned the flames of rumors. According to the PR firm Prowly. “SVB failed to take ownership and, had the Federal Reserve not gotten involved, a massive crisis would have happened. Besides not keeping up with social media, the biggest fault of SVB was not living up to their own values.”. 

Campaign lift and brand equity tracking

There was a point in time that Old Spice was thought of as a product only for old men. The brand was not at all hip or cool, and the idea that it could be revived and made popular with younger people may have seemed outlandish. 

But that’s exactly what happened. P&G invested in the brand, marketing to teens—who weren’t familiar with the brand—and expanding from cologne to washes and deodorants. By 2010, when they created the award winning commercial “The Man You Wish Your Man Could Smell Like,” even adults who had made fun of the brand were beginning to take note of it.

The use of brand monitoring not only provides metrics so that the results of hard work over years can be clearly seen, but can also show whether or not you’re on the right track when making a pivot like Old Spice.

Monitoring brand mentions in AI search and emerging platforms 

It’s trite and a cliché to say that technology is always changing because it’s true. Right now, the newest, shiniest thing is AI search and no one is really sure what other platforms will emerge because of AI. Understanding where your brand shows up in AI search and the platforms that form as a result is crucial. Most brands are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), but AI visibility is different. As technology companies integrate AI into more products, showing up in AI search is becoming more important. 

You can’t make adjustments to improve your visibility if you don’t have a clear picture of how often your brand is mentioned in AI search. Your brand monitoring platform should include AI visibility reporting that includes benchmarks, where mentions are originating (from your own content or external sources) and sentiment analysis of those mentions.

At Zappi, we’re reimaging tracking so that it’s fast, affordable and focuses on your needs. Along with helping you spot trouble (or wins) faster, Zappi also helps your brand find opportunities for growth and test them. 

Zappi provides continuous coverage at a reasonable price. With continuous insights and real-time reporting, you have the tools you need to avoid a reputation-damaging stumble. 

Let us show you how Zappi makes brand tracking frictionless, scalable and accessible.