Media Monitoring: Definition, Benefits, Advanced Tips [2025]

People talk about your brand and products online. Even right now, someone might post a mention. Would you like to find this mention and check whether it’s positive or negative? With media monitoring, it’s possible.

I’m sure you already noticed that people mention your brand on social media. That’s because you get notifications inside social media apps.

But what about untagged media mentions? And those posted on blogs, news sites, podcasts, newsletters, or forums?

They bring you non-social reach. You should track them as well.

That’s where monitoring comes in handy. Yep, it will let you know who and what is talking about your brand in real-time.

What is media monitoring? Definition

Media monitoring is the process of tracking, collecting, and analyzing mentions of a brand, person, organization, or topic across various media channels.

In simple words: Media monitoring means watching what people say about you or your brand online and in the news.

It helps you:

• See who is talking about you
• Know if people are saying good or bad things
• Find out where they are talking — like on social media channels, blogs, or news websites
• Understand what people think about your company, product, or campaign

Key elements of comprehensive media monitoring in 2025:

• Data collection: Real-time gathering of mentions from traditional and digital media sources
• Sentiment analysis: Evaluating whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral
• Advanced filtering: Sorting mentions by importance, sentiment, reach, source, intent, language, geolocation, and influencer score
• Analysis & insights: Turning raw data into actionable insights
• Reporting: Generate advanced reports to share with your team or clients

What is AI media monitoring?

AI media monitoring helps you track what people say about your brand faster, smarter, and with deeper insights.

In simple words: Instead of just collecting mentions, the AI-powered system also understands, analyzes, and summarizes them for you automatically.

Why is it important in 2025?

AI media monitoring transforms raw media mentions into actionable, intelligent insights faster and more accurately.

You’ll save massive amounts of time compared to manual monitoring. That’s the point.

Here’s a list of AI-powered features that each media monitoring software should offer in 2025:

• Better sentiment analysis: Going beyond positive/negative/neutral to detect emotions like admiration, anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness
• Built-in AI chat (just like ChatGPT): Top tools provide a chat based on your monitoring projects, so you don’t have to analyze data manually, and it delivers precise answers
• Topic clustering and analysis: AI can group mentions into trending topics or conversation clusters automatically
• Real-time anomaly spotting: AI automatically spots unusual or unexpected changes in media data and explains what happened
• Smart insights: Automatically generated summaries, trends, and recommendations created by Artificial Intelligence based on your media data

Media monitoring and analysis

Those two approaches go hand in hand. They work as connected steps in one powerful process.

In a nutshell: Media monitoring answers the question: “What is being said and where?” Media analysis answers: “What does this data mean for us?”

Media monitoring	Media analysis
Collect and track mentions of your brand, product, or topic	Understand the meaning behind the mentions
Focus on what is being said and where	Focus on why it’s being said and what to do about it
Gathers data from various media channels (social, news, blogs, reviews, podcasts, etc.)	Interprets the data to find trends, sentiment, impact, and opportunities
Act as the first step – real-time or ongoing tracking	Act as a second step – deeper analysis after collecting enough data

How do they work together?

Media monitoring is about collecting information, such as “Your brand was mentioned 1,200 times on X and Reddit today,” while media analysis is about making sense of that information, such as “80% of mentions are positive, mostly about your new campaign.”

How does media monitoring work?

Ok, you know what media monitoring is and how it can affect your business bottom line, but how does it work?

Monitoring online conversations around your organization is a piece of cake. Dedicated tools will collect every mention in real-time.

The whole process can be broken down into easy steps:

• Step 1: Choose the keywords you want to monitor. Media monitoring services will comb the Internet to search for every mention containing your keyword.
• Step 2: Set up a project. Start media monitoring by choosing the tool and setting up the project. Get familiar with core features and dig into data.
• Step 3: Gather and analyze results. Depending on your media monitoring goal, choose the analytics metric you are going to track closely. Many companies track their content performance, their competitors, or data about their industry. Then, analyze the data by yourself or with the help of an AI-powered media monitoring tool.

The success of your media monitoring depends on properly setting up your project and knowing how to react to the collected insights.

Step 1: Choose the keywords to monitor

Before using a media monitoring platform, it is important to determine your goals. Ask yourself what type of data will be most beneficial for your needs.

Do you want to monitor your brand’s reputation, keep an eye on your competitors’ marketing campaigns, or track trends in your industry?

By clarifying your goals, you can identify the best keywords to monitor. Those could be:

• Brand name and variations
• Product name
• Service categories
• Competitor names
• Hashtags
• Industry-specyfic terms
• Campaign-specific terms
• Event names
• Influencer names

In my opinion, you should always monitor your own brand. Monitoring your company will provide two types of information:

• You will know what, where, and who is talking about your company and how and what changes over time. This will help you assess the performance of your marketing campaigns and identify your biggest supporters and detractors. You will be able to mitigate the results of bad publicity.
• Over time, the results of monitoring will help you set up benchmarks. You will know whether you are making progress or not.

By monitoring yourself, you control the narrative around your brand. You get the business insights needed to shape the story about your company. You know how earned media are describing your company.

Moreover, you should monitor your competitors.

To grow, you need to stay ahead of your competitors. The first step in becoming an industry leader is to know what your competitors are doing.

Media monitoring will pull all the information needed in one place. You will know what your competitors are saying, what campaigns they are using, which channels, and much more.

Step 2: Set up a project

In general, media monitoring tools track every public mention containing your predefined keywords. Most of the tools cover a variety of sources and include social media monitoring.

This is the most critical part of the media monitoring process. The tools will collect mentions containing your selected keywords, so it determines the data you’ll get.

That’s why you should focus on keywords and choose them wisely to get the best possible data.

Then, you need to choose a good media monitoring tool and test it. Some of the tools enable a free trial.

That’s a great opportunity to test the software without paying any money.

While choosing the tool, pay attention to the number of monitored sources.

The more sources, the better.

After setting up a project, you’ll gain access to access to large amounts of data and key brand metrics.

That’s why your media monitoring tool should offer customer service that will help you take the first steps with online monitoring.

Here’s what the monitoring project looks like:

As you can see, besides the list of mentions, the dashboard includes advanced filters to sort the data and charts presenting mentions, reach, and sentiment.

All those features provide quick access to the most important data.

Step 3: Gather and analyze results

Media monitoring tools look up and analyze publicly available online content from websites and social media platforms based on the API of these platforms.

The analysis part is one of the most valuable parts of media tracking projects. Tools analyze gathered data and present them in an actionable way.

What pieces of information will the media monitoring service give you?

• The volume of mentions: That’s a basic media monitoring metric. It will tell you how popular your keyword is and on which platforms.

• Sentiment analysis: Analyzing the media mentions by sentiment will tell you how your audience feels about your brand, product, or service.

• Estimated reach: To know how many people could have seen your posts. This metric will help you measure the results of marketing or brand awareness campaigns. Brand24 will calculate both non-social and social media reach.
• The share of voice: The share of voice will indicate what part of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors.

• Top public profiles: Media monitoring platforms will identify social media accounts talking about your product. This metric can help you run an influencer marketing campaign.
• Trending hashtags: A carefully generated list of trending hashtags that will help you boost your brand visibility and reach new audiences.
• Emotion analysts: Companies can gauge how the public feels about their brand, products, or services by understanding the emotional tone of media coverage and social discussions.
• Geo analysis: Different regions can have vastly different perceptions and reactions to the same brand, product, or event. Geo analysis helps in understanding these regional differences.
• Presence score: The presence score indicates how visible and prominent a brand or topic is in the media landscape.
• Reputation score: The reputation score provides a tangible metric to understand how a brand is perceived. A sudden drop in the reputation score can signal a potential crisis or negative sentiment shift.
• Context of a discussion: Understanding the context helps accurately gauge the sentiment and importance of a mention. Also, context helps distinguish discussions that are truly relevant to your brand or topic.

What’s great is that some AI-powered tools presents a clear insights summary, so you don’t have to waste your time on mentions analysis.

Here, you can see the summary of my Reebok project:

Importance of media monitoring in 2025

In 2025, media tracking is more critical than ever because online conversations move faster than ever before, and the media environment has become more complex and AI-driven.

Conversations about brands can spread globally in minutes across TikTok, X (Twitter), Reddit, blogs, podcasts, and news.

Having this in mind, it’s good to know what’s being said about your business online: by your happy and unhappy customers, by industry media, or by competitors.

So, why is media monitoring important?

1. Massive volume of information

In 2025, the internet is more saturated than ever. From social media to podcasts, news sites, forums, and TikTok, brands are mentioned everywhere, but not all mentions matter.

AI-powered tools can filter the noise, allowing brands to focus only on relevant, high-impact conversations.

How can you advantage:

• Detect relevant mentions across social media posts, news, blogs, podcasts, and forums
• Avoid missing meaningful conversations about your brand or competitors
• Get real-time alerts that something important is going on

2. Brand reputation management

Consumers in 2025 buy from brands they trust. Studies show that companies with a strong, positive reputation see higher customer retention, easier hiring, and stronger stock performance.

Furthermore, analyzing customer sentiment helps businesses adjust their marketing strategies effectively.

How can you advantage:

• Respond timely to any negative review that could damage your brand’s reputation
• Improve products and services based on public feedback from the target audience
• Prepare for crises by understanding public perceptions and industry trends before situations escalate

3. Real-time crisis management

Crises don’t wait for business hours. Monitoring tools act as your early warning system, giving PR teams time to react before the damage is done.

Monitoring customer feedback and complaints on social media channels and review sites helps PR professionals address issues quickly and improve customer service.

How can you advantage:

• Quickly detect the spike in negative mentions and find the cause of the problem
• Listen to consumer complaints during a crisis to plan effective communication and conflict resolution
• Monitor the sentiment trends to judge whether the addressed resolution works

4. Competitor monitoring & analysis

In 2025, using a media monitoring solution for competitor analysis is one of the smartest ways to stay ahead of the curve.

Understanding competitors’ strengths through media mentions can inform your product development or marketing strategies.

How can you advantage:

• Monitor competitors’ media coverage, share of voice, hashtags, products, campaigns, and audience sentiment
• Study their successes and failures to avoid their PR or product mistakes, and adopt tactics from high-performing campaigns
• Fill the gaps by monitoring what their audience is asking for but not getting

5. Industry trend identification

Trend identification and analysis in 2025 is a game-changing strategy. It empowers you to spot what’s gaining traction before your competitors do.

You can identify new keywords, hashtags, or conversation themes before they go mainstream.

How can you advantage:

• Get early alerts on trending hashtags, keywords, or topics
• Identify new consumer interests and behaviors
• Launch timely content or products that ride the trend

6 tips from media monitoring experts

Now that you are acquainted with media monitoring, and you know some of the best practices, it’s high time to discuss additional tips in that matter.

Below, you will find a few of our tips as media monitoring experts.

These will make you stand out from your competition, allow you to become a power user of tools, and elevate your business strategy to the next level!

Let’s discover how you can leverage media monitoring in 2025.

01 Set alerts

Most media monitoring tools let you set alerts and notifications for some events happening in your projects.

For example, Brand24 sends you daily notifications by default, but additionally, you can set Storm Alerts. These alerts will notify you when there’s a huge spike in mentions occurring in one of your projects.

For PR management, these Storm Alerts can help you quickly identify and overcome a PR crisis. Social marketers can use them to implement real-time marketing. 

Check if your media monitoring tool of choice features a mobile app like Brand24. If you want to be up to date with new mentions you can install the app on your mobile and get instant push notifications.

02 Monitor in the target language

Many marketers repeat the mistake of not monitoring in their language, especially if you operate in a local market. 

This way, you can filter out the results that shouldn’t concern you. 

What is very important when monitoring in the local language is to remember about declension. Be sure to include all possible pronunciations of your brand to avoid missing some mentions.

Brand24 offers media monitoring in 20+ languages, including Polish, German, Spanish, Turkish, and more.

03 Keyword monitoring

Not only should you be interested in setting up monitoring projects with your brand name, but also you should identify some keywords and key phrases for your market niche. 

For example, if your business is a social listening app, you’d like to have a project for monitoring the phrase “social listening.”

Why? First of all, you will be able to identify your competition and discover new and emerging rivals. Secondly, you can find potential brand ambassadors (more on that in point 6). And finally, you can enrich your linkbuilding campaign with found keyword mentions.

04 Boost your hashtag strategy

By following people actively talking about your brand, you can also elevate your hashtag strategy.

By monitoring social media and following influencers, you will see what hashtags they are using. In Brand24, you can see trending hashtags around your monitored keyword inside the project in the analysis section. 

05 Identify the most influential people in your niche

Tools like Brand24 let you identify potential brand ambassadors within the app. If your strategy includes influencers, then you should use media monitoring to look for people who talk a lot about your brand or market niche. 

There are numerous advantages of influencer marketing, and if you want to partake in this type of advertising, media monitoring apps will help you a lot.

06 Share the data with your coworkers

“Sharing is caring”, as some people say. It’s a part of internal marketing. A lot of publications that are collected via monitoring social media and other websites are missed by your coworkers. 

Sharing success stories of your brand among other employees boosts morale and general satisfaction of work.

As a part of the PR management strategy, you can also share the media monitoring data with your investors (especially if they look good). It’s vital to maintain excellent relations with the investors, and showing them how well your brand is prospering will only confirm that working with you is worth it.

Conclusion

To sum up, media monitoring can be a beneficial tool if we use it properly and understand how it works.

Thanks to its data and features, you can get valuable knowledge about your brand’s online presence, competitors, stay up-to-date with trends in our industry, and improve our customers’ experience.

I hope that now you know more about what is media monitoring and analysis and why it is worth your attention.

Although it’s not for free, media monitoring is worth investing money in because of its wide range of benefits and opportunities to boost your business’ growth. So try media monitoring for free!