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Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What's Being Said And Stay Ahead



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Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What's Being Said And Stay Ahead

You or your brand may put a lot of hard work into providing an excellent first customer UX. And you may work hard at making sure you pick the right promotion and marketing campaigns hoping to find happy clients and get happy feedback. So it's only natural you'll want good things to be said about you or your brand online.

Whether it's happy customers giving their mates a recommendation or just good all round stuff, mentions and things said in a good light about you and your business. There's no doubt that "word of mouth" advertising like this is the best form of advertising you can get!

But what about when someone says something bad or negative about you or your brand online somewhere? How can you know about that and then go and handle it? And hopefully either get it changed or removed? Or write a matter of fact counter comment to defend you or your brands dignity and integrity?

The Internet is a vast wide open space and things said and put on the Internet can spread faster than an Ozzy wildfire! But with so many sites out there where your name or brand / business name could be mentioned on, whether in a bad light or a good light, how can you know without constantly trawling all the sites day and night?

And what about your competitors and rivals? What are they up to? Which are using which social media site the most and how so? What other mentions their brand name is getting on what other sites and places on the Internet and why? How can you know this without searching them all yourself to see what's new?

By using one or all of these Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention, Citation and Competition Spy Tools 2016 that's how!

Top 10 Brand Watch and Competition Spy Tools 2016

1. Brandwatch Analytics

Because there's so many different sources where your or your competitor's site or brand name can be mentioned on, Brandwatch checks over 70,000,000 sources on the Internet and gives you advanced statistical details about them and shows deep insights into public opinion on any topic on the Internet. Using Brandwatch you can see where any mentions are made online wherever they are made as well as just how many people those mentions are reaching (how many people are seeing it) based on the shares, likes and comments etc they have.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What
Lets you reply to / engage mentions/comments etc from the dashboard.
Provides full International mention tracking.
Available in up to 27 different languages.
Service only available upon subscription.

2. Brands Eye

Similar to Brandwatch Analytics, Brands Eye crowd-sourced site uses people to monitor your mentions for you (that's their job) and also lets you see whether it's somewhere that has a lot of people using it or just a small blog comment on a small blog or somewhere on a social media profile or high traffic website so you can prioritize which ones you want to handle and deal with first. You'll be able to see if it's a genuine customer feedback somewhere on a some big and establised website, or some new website that is trash talking your name in order to try and get a sale. Letting you send a DMCA before anyone else sees it!
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What
3. IFTTT

If you haven't yet discovered IFTTT and aren't using it and need this sort of thing then now is the time to dip your toes ladies and gentlemen! With IFTTT you can monitor mentions of your brand name, website link, social names and all sorts across a wide range of social media channels and sources. For instance, you could set up an IFTTT recipe that sends you a text message or an email each time your brand is mentioned on Facebook or Instagram or somewhere. It's really rather simple to use and there are already so many IFTTT recipes that have been made for this reason that you can just use yourself! No need to create one yourself, just use one of the pre-made recipes and away you go!
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What
4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite has been getting a lot more mentions of late as more and more people are using it schedule their social media posts! But Hootsuite can also be used as a brand mention and competition spy tool too. All you have to do is just create a new search query using your brand name or website name and then Hootsuite sends you alerts whenever that brand name is mentioned anywhere on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc etc.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

5. SEM Rush

SEM Rush is basically a very comprehensive list of SEO tools for SEM's, SEO' and SMM's, digital marketers and the like. Letting them keep track of their own brands mentions as well as their competitors too to see what they're up to. The only thing is, before now, it's been very hard to discover when mentions are made in things like comments of blogs or social media pages etc. Sorted by display advertising and organic links to paid and organic search results. So SEM Rush is dedicated to finding out these hard-to-find mentions for you. You can create alerts with it which you can receive as they're found. But also see deep insight into what your competitors or rival sites are up to opening up opportunities for you to do the same thing. You can also see what keywords your competitors are targeting and where they are ranking for them in comparison to where you are too.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

6. BuzzSumo

Most people use BuzzSumo because it can help you to identify hot new niches and trends appearing in the market so you can be one of the first ones to jump on that niche or trend. But you can also use BuzzSumo to keep track of your own company or business name as well as your competitors too. Just set your or their name as an alert query and you'll be sent an alert in real time as it is found.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

7. Mention

Did someone mention mention? Mention is quite a basic and no fuss brand name monitoring tool. They have both free and paid plans with the free one giving you up to 3000 mentions but only 2 alerts. With bigger plans having more features depending on what you need for you or your business.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

8. Talkwalker Alerts

If you're ever looking for an alternative to Google Alerts, it's Talkwalker Alerts. It works very much the same as Google Alerts and the layout is similar too. So very simple to use and understand, just enter the words you want to monitor Talkwalker Alerts will send you an email at the end of the day or as they happen in any language or option you choose.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

9. Social Mention

Like how some can tell you the reputation or the authority of the site or webpage where your mention was found on Social Mention puts emphasis on the quality of those mentions. You can see the strength your brand has online using Social Mention by how much it's being discussed, how many times it's being repeated on a particular source or place like Twitter for example and how much reach those mentions got as well based on comments and shares count and things.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

10. Google Alerts

Of course it wouldn't be fair not to mention Google Alerts in a top 10 list for the best brand watch and competition spy tools. Considering they've been allowing you to keep track or your brand name or your competitors or just about anything else online for years now for free. But Google Alerts although free, is a very adequate and effective tool to let you do just that. So very easy to use and setup a tracking campaign, just enter your keywords, choose the criteria you prefer and have it sent as-it-happens or at the end of the day in a digested email.
Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

Conclusion

By making use of these brand watch and competition spy tools, you can stay one step ahead of your competition! And by making use of them you'll have a much better chance at finding out about what's being said about your brand or business or employees. Find out who on your team is working the hardest or which product or service gets the most mentions perhaps. Or even that of your competitors too. And see what they're up to exactly. Helping you not to be one or two steps ahead of them and reaching more of the clients you're looking for! Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

Do you use any of these brand watch and mention tools?

Are there any others that you would recommend in 2016?

Comments

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TommyCarey
Oh man, this list is a lot more detailed than I thought it was going to be Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What Well, maybe not because it was Mike who posted it lol

Anyway lol, I've used a few of these and I definitely liked them. Watching your brand online is like baby sitting kind of, you need to keep an eye on it or it can stick a fork in an outlet and electrocute itself. People can be talking bad about your website or brand and you won't even know it unless you set up a line of defense in the terms of getting alerts or searching around online manually. But who likes to do all this stuff manually... not me Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What It would take hours every day to go through all the links that were posted, and even then some of those posts would be me and that's just wasting time checking my own comments about myself Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

Out of the 10 here I've used Hootsuite, SEM Rush, and Google Alerts. Google alerts is underused by a ton of companies and it shouldn't be. It's so simple and quick to set up and I think people just don't know about it. I read a story about an indie game developer who had his google alerts set up in a way that he would get notified about almost anything referring to his game. He would then log into whatever website was talking about him and comment lol. People said it was actually pretty amazing in the speed he would get on that website and comment. And he wasn't even very nice in the comments when someone was saying his game was bad lol.

I've also used hootsuite for social media automation, but never for brand awareness. I may have to look back into it to see what else I can set it up to do Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What

SEM Rush is a pretty big name now and I'm sure a ton of people used it, or at least heard of it. I've used it a little but I haven't been on there for at least a year so I didn't know exactly what the newer features were until I just creeped on their pages after I read you post Top 10 Brand Watch, Mention and Competition Spy Tools 2016 - See What



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Cristian
Mike, from the ones you listed I'm using SEM Rush, BuzzSumo and Google Alerts at the moment.

On top of these three, I also use Ahrefs, which I think should be in this list because it is a really good tool, no really complete (none of them are) but is the most complete tool I'm using and I'm extracting the most data from Ahrefs when I'm doing my reports or a really important marketing strategy for a new website.

Overall a really nice article Mike! I'm really gonna try some of the new tools you listed here, especially the top 3, haven't used those yet and I'm very curious on what they have to offer.



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Lynne
Oh nice Mike, this is very helpful.

I had no idea that Hootsuite has that option to send you alerts when you are mentioned (or any search string).

I do have my name, my business name and all my websites in Google Alerts to let me know if I am mentioned anywhere. I also use Google Analytics to follow trends in my niches so I can stay up to date. I also have my competitors in Google Alerts so I can watch what they are doing.

I can certainly see how valuable all these resources are! I haven't heard of any of these except for Hootsuite and of course Google Analytics. I am going to set aside some time to investigate these further and see how I can best use them.

Once again thank you for sharing some amazing websites Mike.



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obtlyne
Mike, the list of tool mentioned here is great!
I would suggest a platform Snoopreport for monitoring user actions on Instagram http://snoopreport.com. This service tracks all the user's likes, comments and follows so you can monitor customers and competitors activity on Instagram.



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