How to Track Media Mentions? [2025]

People talk about brands constantly. According to Brand24, Samsung received 708,000 media mentions during the last 30 days, which indicated an estimated reach of almost 3 million. Over 96% of those conversations had a positive sentiment. These numbers hold great marketing value. Here’s how you can also get your own insights!

• What Are Media Mentions? Media mentions are references to your brand, product, or industry in blogs, news, podcasts, review sites, or social media. Social listening features help you measure your brand awareness, reputation, and audience sentiment.
• How to Track Media Mentions?
  Manual search – simple but limited.
  Google Alerts – free, but misses many social mentions.
  Media monitoring tools – best option; track tagged + untagged mentions, give real-time alerts, and analyze sentiment.
• Why Track Media Mentions? They provide a better understanding of a target audience, help make more accurate & data-driven decisions, boost your AI visibility, benchmark with competitors, and build up your reputation.

What are media mentions?

Media mentions are when your brand, product, or industry topic is discussed in different media types. This includes online sites like social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, and reviews.

Here you have an example of media mentions detected by a media monitoring tool:

Marketing agencies track brand mentions of the brands they represent and their competitors. They also track keywords related to a brand’s industry to identify the most frequently discussed topics at the moment.

But why are these online mentions important?

Well, they can completely change how people see your brand.

Media mentions can completely change how people perceive your brand:

• Positive references build popularity, authority, and social proof.
• Negative references require quick action to protect reputation.
• References about competitors or your market provide valuable insights for positioning and strategy.

Tracking mentions, especially social media mentions, is key to understanding where your brand stands in the media.

Benefits of tracking media mentions:

• Boost Brand Awareness: Mentions across social media and news expand visibility and create powerful social proof.
• Understand Audience Sentiment: Track positive and negative mentions to manage reputation and refine communication.
• Identify Influencers: Discover influencers and journalists who already talk about your brand for stronger influencer marketing.
• Drive Brand Engagement & Community: Respond to mentions directly, increase social media engagement, and build a loyal community.
• Spot Market Trends: Mentions highlight new industry trends, helping you adapt strategies before others.
• Real-Time Alerts for Crisis Management: Get instant notifications when negative conversations spike and react quickly.
• Strengthen SEO: Brand mentions across the web and search engines signal authority, boosting visibility.
• Know Your Target Audience: Media mentions reveal what your target audience values and how they interact with your brand.

How to track media mentions?

There are two ways of tracking media mentions. You can try to do that manually, use Google Alerts, or use external social media monitoring tools.

Method	Manual Tracking	Google Alerts	Media Monitoring Tools (e.g., Brand24)
Coverage & Accuracy	Very limited –misses untagged mentions, podcasts & forums.	Moderate – tracks mentions indexed by Google, but misses many platforms (social, podcasts, newsletters).	Comprehensive – covers all social media & non-social. Also detects untagged mentions & sentiment.
Ease of Use	Time-consuming, requires constant checking.	Easy to set up, but results can be inconsistent or delayed.	User-friendly dashboards, AI analysis, automated alerts.
Cost	Free (just your time)	Free	Paid (varies by plan)
Best For	Very small brands or individuals with minimal online presence.	Beginners or businesses with no budget, but only for basic monitoring.	Businesses, PR teams, & enterprise-level brands.

So, which is the best solution for you?

01 Manual tracking

Social media mentions can be tracked within the apps by counting the notifications.

But that’s extremely time-consuming and doesn’t give you much information about your overall brand awareness.

You’ll have no idea about what’s being said about your brand on forums, podcasts, and many more.

And imagine someone wanted to share feedback but made a typo and didn’t tag you – you won’t notice that, too.

Lucky us, there are tools that can do that hard work for us.

For example, Brand24 can track online mentions (even those not tagged directly). This is what an untagged mention looks like in the dashboard:

And that’s the typo in a mention that Brand24 found:

02 Google Alerts

This is a popular choice for tracking media mentions, especially if the company has limited budgets. This free media mentions tool is attractive due to its simplicity.

Sadly, it has many limitations.

The main problem is the lack of coverage. You might only see a fraction of the conversations about your brand as the tool doesn’t have the ability to search all platforms.

This leads to a lack of context and detail in the data gathered.

Plus, people admit they find it inconsistent in capturing mentions. Many relevant discussions and references might slip through unnoticed, leaving gaps in your monitoring.

In the fast-paced world of media and public relations, receiving delayed notifications can mean missing out on critical opportunities to engage or respond to evolving conversations around your brand.

As a result, after trying out a free solution like Google Alerts, many PR professionals and businesses ultimately turn to more sophisticated solutions.

03 Using a media monitoring tool

Manual searches and Google Alerts only cover part of the picture. Media monitoring tools are the most effective solution if you want real-time notifications, sentiment analysis, and broad coverage across social media and the web.

What Brand24 Tracks:

• Social platforms covered – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitch
• News and blogs – articles, reviews, industry press
• Forums and communities – Reddit, niche discussions
• Review sites and newsletters – customer feedback and brand perception
• Podcasts – spoken content mentioning your brand

It only collects public mentions, not private groups or profiles, but this still covers the majority of conversations that shape your brand’s reputation.

This makes it easier to monitor social media performance, manage reputation, and keep track of competitors—all within a single dashboard.

There are two helpful features for brand mention monitoring:

• Anomaly detector: It shows when there’s a sudden change in how often your brand is mentioned.

This is a valuable feature for brand reputation as you can quickly find out about potential problems.

• Comparison tab: Lets you compare different times or even check out what competitors are doing. This is helpful for seeing how your brand is doing over a given period of time or compared to others.

Discover our client’s success story — read the case study.

FAQ

How to analyze media mentions to gain insights?

Analyzing them is much easier with the right tool that offers sentiment analysis.

It uses smart features to help you understand your brand’s mentions quickly.

Let’s talk about AI Insights and Metrics Analysis.

These features automatically look through your mentions and give you the most important points. This means you get important information without having to go through those numbers yourself.

There’s also something really cool called AI Brand Assistant.

You can ask questions about your project, and it gives you answers using your own data. This makes sure you get useful and correct information.

Here, you can see the mentions analysis conducted by Brand Assistant for Huda Beauty in August 2025:

That saves my time and gets straight to the conclusions I need to shape marketing strategy or speed up the marketing reporting process.

Why are media mentions important for SEO?

Mentions aren’t just about PR, they also bring SEO value:

• Every brand mention broadens your digital footprint across the web.
• Even unlinked mentions are recognized by search engines as signals of authority and trust.
• Strong earned media mentions improve E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust), which Google uses to rank content.
• In 2025, AI-driven search and LLMs (large language models) use brand mentions to surface credible results.

I recommend reading a full guide about brand mentions for SEO. It’ll help you explore all the possibilities that mentions offer and how they are shifting nowadays through LLMs.

How do I group media mentions by topic or product?

Capturing media mentions is only the first step. To stay informed and extract real insights, you need to organize them in a way that shows the big picture of how people talk about your brand.

Here’s how Brand24 helps you structure mentions across news sites, blogs, and social media platforms:

• AI Topic Analysis
  Automatically groups mentions by themes like product features, pricing, or customer service. This saves hours of manual sorting and reveals hidden discussions you might otherwise miss.
• Keyword & Product Tracking
  Monitor specific product names, slogans, or campaign phrases. This ensures mentions are correctly attributed — for example, separating feedback about two different product lines.
• Hashtag Monitoring
  Track branded and popular hashtags across social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, and X. This helps you measure campaign reach and compare results with rivals.
• Custom Filters & Tags
  Sort mentions by sentiment, source, or influencer score. This makes it easy to see which social media accounts or creators generated the most positive buzz.

Want to try media mention tracking? Start with the Brand24 trial and improve your marketing.