How to Start Monitoring Your Brand Online with Brand24

6 min read

Social listening tools just likeĀ all different online tools for business might be a bit tricky and hard to use at first. They usually offer lots of distinct features which seem not really helpful when we are just starting our adventure with a specific tool. This is why all the walk-through and step-by-step guides that many industry blogs publish come very useful in the very beginning.

Social listening with Brand24 is easy as a piece of cake, but I know it may not seem so. This is why I created this short guide to creating new project in which you can access content related to the topic/brand/product/etc. you want to monitor. Sit comfortable, open your mind and read on.

The very first step with Brand24

If you are already registered to Brand24, you should now log into your dashboard. When you enter a home page you should click on the login button in the upper-right corner. If not, go to the register page, by clicking the button next to it and sign up to your 2-week free trial.

home page brand24

OK, now as you are logged into your personal dashboard, you can start creating your very first project. But before that, let me explain you some terms used in Brand24.

Each account has an option to create many projects for monitoring distinct topic/brands/products/etc. The number of projects that can be set up in an account is limited by the number of keywords assigned to a single account. The default number of keywords for a 2-week trail version is 5.

How does it look in practice? If you have 5 keywords you can create:

  • 1 project with 5 keywords,
  • 2 projects with 2 and 3,
  • 2 projects with 1 and 4 keywords,
  • 3 projects with 1, 2 and 2 keywords each,
  • 5 projects with 1 keyword each…

You can split your keywords between your projects in different combinations, depending on your needs. For example, you want to monitor your brand, so one project would be set up for your brand only and you will probably need only one keyword. Another project might be created for competition monitoring so you will enter each competitor as a separate keyword.

Project Configuration

Logged into your dashboard yet? Let’s start with creating a new project! Your main dashboard will include the list of projects both on the sidebar and in the middle column. Of course projects will appear after you set up one. How to do it? Just click onto blue-green button on the sidebar or in the middle column (pic below) and you’ll be redirected to project configuration site.

brand24 dashboard new project

Then you’ll have to choose whether you want to monitor a brand/company, sales leads, competitor or topic.

project configuration site brand24 new

After you pick an option right for you enter keyword that you want to monitor and click on create project. Brand24 will collect all the mentions that include specified keyword. If you need to set up more complex project click on More settings.

enter your keyword brand24 project configuration

More settings in the project configuration site includes three tabs:

  • Keywords,
  • Sources,
  • Notifications.

Let’s walk through each of them.

Keyword Tab

project configuration

In the first tab – Keywords, you can give your project a project name, that would appear in the list of your projects. The given name has no influence on data that is collected through monitoring. Thus if you want to monitor your brand, you can name it: “Brand X” and if it will include all competitors, you can simply enter “Competition” etc. This name is only for your information.

After picking a friendly name for your project, you can start a proper configuration of keywords. You have three fields in this section:

  • Keyword,
  • Required keyword,
  • Excluded keyword.

Keyword is required – you cannot leave this field empty. It might be a single word or a phrase which would be a base for collecting mentions. Our tool will gather all the results from the Internet that include this word/phrase.

If you want to narrow your results, you can enter Required keyword, which is optional. If you enter a required keyword our tool will gather mentions that include BOTH Keyword Required keyword. This field comes useful when a name of a brand is ambiguous. A good example of such brand is Target, an American retailing company. In this case, we should enter “target” as the Keyword and “retail” (or store, or shopping) as required word.

You can add more required words (separated with comas), but you should remember that our tool will collect mentions that include keyword and ALL required words that you enter in one field. So I recommend to add only one required word in one row. Otherwise, the tool will not collect any mentions.

Excluded words narrow your results by eliminating these mentions that include words entered in this field. It means that our tool will collect content that contains keyword, but does not contain excluded word. You can put more excluded words separated with comas in one field and your results will not include ANY of them.

As it was mentioned before, you can add more than one keyword in a single project. You just need to click: “+ add next keyword” (the graphic below). This is especially useful for ambiguous brand names or brands that have different forms of names (e.g. abbreviations).

keywords project configuration

In the case of brands with ambiguous names you should add the same Keyword in each row and different Required keywords next to it to narrow your results to those which are significant to you. The number of rows will depend on the number of words that describe your business. In the case of Target, the required words, as mentioned above, will be “shopping”, “shop”, “retail” etc. (the image below). If you notice that the tool collects lots of mentions related to different topics you can also add excluded keywords.

target project configuration

Let’s consider brand Coca-cola. Consumers talk about it using distinct names, such as: coke, coca-cola, cocacola, cola, etc. You should include all the possibilities in your keywords, but don’t forget to exclude some words which may spoil your results. For instance, users may also mean drugs by coke, so you should exclude word “drug” and “cocaine”.

cocacola project configuration
language filter in project configuration

EXTRA TIP: When you create your very first project monitoring your brand, I recommend to set it up with general keywords and see what are the most common topics that appear in this context. Then you can decide which words to exclude or enter as required words.

The last feature in the tab Keywords is Language filter which lets you decide whether you want to narrow mentions to only one language or monitor all of them.

Sources Tab

Sources tab enables you to pick sources you want to monitor. You can pick any number of categories from:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Blogs
  • Forum
  • News
  • Video
  • Photo
  • Other
sources tab project configuration

However, I do not recommend unchecking any sources. You can always select distinct sources in a dashboard after project is set up.

This tab also includes two different features: Excluded sites, Excluded social media authors, but they are not available during the new project configuration so I’ll get back to them in another post.

Notifications Tab

Notifications Tab enables you to set up notifications that will inform you about new mentions. You can add a few different notifications depending on how often you want to get them. By default it is set for all mentions, once a day through email and mobile. However, you can edit, delete them and add new ones.

notifications tab

If you want to add a new notification click on the “+ Add more notifications” button and then enter your preferences. First thing to add is an email address. Then you need to set up a frequency from the list:

  • real-time, every hour,
  • every 6 hours,
  • every 12 hours,
  • once a day,
  • every week,
  • every months.

You can also set a number of mentions over which notifications will be sent. The last thing is choosing whether you want to be notified through mobile, email or both.

adding the new notification

There is also a possibility to set up notifications with filters, but we will discuss it in another section.

If all the settings fit your needs you can save your project. Then you will be redirected to the new project’s page. You need to wait up to a few minutes for your results to load and then you can start analyzing Internet data about your brand.

SAVING PROJECT

I hope you find this short introduction to project configuration useful and from now on this will never be a problem for you. However, if you still need some guidance drop us a message through Intercom chat or email and our Helpdesk will help you with setting up your brand monitoring.

If you need more information about project configuration leave us a comment!

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