5 Brand Monitoring Metrics You Should Track

Media monitoring is our bread and butter. And we love to share the knowledge! We’ve already talked about hashtag monitoring or sentiment analysis. Today is high time to discover yet another application of social listening – tracking brand monitoring metrics. Who, what, and where can make or break your brand reputation. Today, I’d like to present top 5 brand monitoring metrics you should track. 

All of the brand metrics are based on results from Brand24, an Internet monitoring tool. You can set up your free trial here (we won’t ask for your credit card). 

Here’s our itinerary for today:

Why do you need to track brand metrics?

Tracking the performance of your brand should be an indispensable part of not only your digital marketing strategy, but also of managing your brand reputation.

There are 2 very important aspects to consider in online reputation management, and this short video does a good job explaining them:

If you track the right brand metrics you should be able to answer following questions:

• Who is talking about your brand?
• What are they saying?
• Where are they present? Which channels do they use to communicate?
• How do they feel about your messaging?

The knowledge of who, what, where, and how will give you the necessary weapon to fight any looming social media crisis, increase your brand awareness, or achieve any other goal you set ahead of your brand. 

Once you know why you should track brand metrics, it’s time to answer he hard question – which brand monitoring metrics should you track?

As marketers, we have to sail through the restless waters of data abundance. 

There are so many metrics to track and tools to do it, that it’s hard to distinguish the metrics that will drive your brand’s strategy and help you achieve your goals from vanity metrics that make you feel good, but won’t add any value to your branding activities. 

Tracking and analysing the right set of data will help you make more informed decisions. Brand protection and, ultimately, the success of your company, depends on basing your decisions on the right metrics. 

So, without further delay, let’s take a look at 5 brand monitoring metrics you should track!

1. Volume of mentions and sentiment analysis

Ok, technically, these are two separate metrics, but I insist we analyse them together. 

Volume of mentions and sentiment analysis are two sides of the same coin. To get the whole picture of the state of your brand you have to examine the number of mentions about your brand and the context of the mentions. 

Imagine you see a sudden spike in the number of mentions containing your keyword. Initially, you might think it’s a positive indicator of your brand’s reputation and online presence. 

By analysing the sentiment of your brand’s mentions you’re able to assess how people feel about your brand. A high number of mentions and a rise in negative sentiment is an indicator of an approaching crisis. 

On the other hand, when the sentiment is mostly positive, you can focus more on brand promotion to reach even wider audience with your messaging. 

How to build your brand awareness? Take a look at 9 marketing tactics to build brand awareness.

2. Engagement rate

Once you establish your marketing strategy and start posting your content on a regular basis, you need to measure the engagement around it. 

There are different type of engagement and social media algorithms assign different value to likes, comments, or shares. 

Brand engagement will indicate how well your message resonates with your audience. The more popular your content is, the more interactions you’ll receive. And the likes and comments translate directly into the position of your posts on different social media platforms. The higher the content ranks, the better chance more people will see the post. 

That is a stepping stone to becoming and industry leader. Acting as an industry leader will have a positive impact on your business goals as it helps increase your revenue. 

3. The share of voice

The share of voice is one of the most important, yet often overlooked, marketing metrics. 

You can measure the share of voice using this equation:

your company metric/total market metric x 100

Measuring the share of voice is a bit of a marketing challenge. It’s almost impossible to track the brand metric without help from an external tool.

That’s why we got you covered!

Brand24 will automatically calculate the share of voice for your keywords. You can see a list of the most influential public accounts talking about your brand in the Analysis tab.

This brand monitoring metric helps you determine two aspects of your online presence. 

Firstly, it shows how strong your brand profile is in social media. How many potential clients are talking about your brand? How popular is your brand among your target audience? All of these questions and much more can be answered by taking a look at the share of voice of your brand. 

Secondly, the share of voice shows who is talking about your brand and how wide-spread their message is. You can evaluate the success of your social media marketing campaign and get insights on your marketing activities. 

4. Social media reach

You are probably active on many different social media platforms. After all, your customers expect to find your company on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or your local social media platform. 

How well your company is performing on social media depends on many different factors. You can measure the performance of your social media channel by closely examining the social media reach of your posts. 

Social media reach tells you how many people could have seen your social media posts. 

As your social media account grows so should your social media reach. Just remember that social media reach is just one of brand metrics you should track and analyse.

Try to target the audience that will respond to your messaging and not just blindly try to reach the biggest audience.

5. The most influential sites

I bet you didn’t expect to find the most influential sites as one of your key brand tracking metrics. 

Finding out where people are talking about your brand is equally important to finding out what and how are they talking. 

In most cases, the most influential sites will be covered by the holy three – Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By analysing the most influential sites you can find some new platforms you weren’t aware of. 

The ultimate goal of your social media presence is to reach audience interested in your messaging. There still might be platforms where your audience is present, but you’re not. 

Tracking brand metrics – wrap up

You should monitor brand mentions for many various reasons but the main goal of taking a closer look at your brand performance is to assess the perception of your brand online. 

That’s why tracking your brand metrics is such a complex issue. You have to assess many different issues of your brand online presence, get to know your audience to deliver the right message, at the right time and platform and constantly monitor what is being said about you.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT

How to Measure Brand Awareness and Why You Need It

How to Measure the Share of Voice

The 12 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools

Do you prefer video over written content? No problem! Take a look at the short (and free!) Udemy course on media monitoring we created! You’ll find everything you need to know about online reputation management