4 Reasons Why Monitoring Your Brand Matters

Let’s say a customer approaches you after a conference presentation to tell you how much she loves your product. Would you take time to respond to her and thank her for the kind words?

What if a customer wrote a blog post walking his audience through how he uses your product at his office? How long would it take you to thank him for the shout-out?

Many brands choose to ignore the chatter that takes place every day online, even though some of that discussion could be directly related to increasing business. Some brands simply dismiss these messages as gone forever, as though they’ve been lost in a black hole, never to be seen or engaged with again.

The attention you pay to those who talk about your brand, whether online or offline, matters. Actively listening allows you to gain insight into conversations that are happening, whether they are directed at your brand or not.

Our team at Piktochart is able to capture upwards of 1,200 brand mentions each week. The discussion can range from comments posted on a forum like Reddit to teachers uploading tutorials to YouTube about ways they are using Piktochart in their classrooms. What we once would glean from assembling a focus group can now be found by simply “listening in” on the conversations happening organically online.

Here are four reasons we carefully monitor our brand mentions:

1. Identify problems faster. Closely monitoring what users are saying about your product helps you identify bugs to fix and features that should be built next.
2. Learn about your industry. Listening to a customer compare your product to your competitor’s helps you gain insight into your customers’ needs. You can learn which tools customers use alongside your product and gain insight into where the industry is headed.
3. Lend a helping hand. According to Jay Baer, not responding to a customer complaint in social media decreases customer advocacy by 43%. Seeing an alert each time your brand name is mentioned oftentimes provides the opportunity to offer a helping hand. Sometimes customers give feedback about a problem in a way that is tricky to find if you aren’t monitoring your brand mentions closely. For example, some users don’t mention our social media handle or directly email us a link to the blog post they wrote. By getting a quick notification every time the word “Piktochart” is mentioned online, we have the opportunity to step in, provide valuable tips and tricks, and delight a community member.
4. Strike valuable partnerships. Monitoring mentions of your brand online could lead to partnerships and collaborations that you might not find through more traditional channels. Breanna DiGiammarino, Senior Director Social Innovation at Indiegogo, mentioned our tool in a tweet — and it got us thinking about how we could work together. After reaching out to Breanna, we settled on utilizing her team’s expertise when designing a crowdfunding infographic template. When we announced the work we did with Indiegogo, our audience was thrilled and shared the announcement blog post more than 900 times!

Meeting Breanna DiGiammarino from Indiegogo for the first time on Twitter.

4 months later, we launched an infographic template for crowdfunders!

To monitor our brand online, Piktochart uses Mention. Mention is a tool to monitor everything about your brand online from your executives’ names and your brand name, to even competitor mentions — all in realtime. I like to think of it as Google Alerts on steroids.

“The tool was originally developed as an alternative for Google Alerts,” explained Brittany Berger, Head of Content & PR at Mention.com. “Users have told us that for every 10 mentions on Mention, they receive only one Google Alert.”

Other tools in the brand monitoring arena include SocialMention, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo.

The work doesn’t end there, though. You also have to closely measure the brand sentiment of your online mentions. By measuring sentiment of messages, your team can understand the feelings your customers have in a quick snapshot. You’re able to get a unique picture of the social conversations that are taking place. Taking monitoring mentions a step further to include brand sentiment helps improve the health of the brand over time and even head off a crisis.

What tools do you use to monitor your brand online? Have you sparked meaningful partnerships with other brands by listening to chatter on the internet? If you aren’t monitoring your brand mentions online, what’s stopping you?

A version of this post originally appeared on PR Daily.