The undisputed leader in social media management
For over a decade, the world’s largest enterprises have trusted Sprinklr Social for its in-depth listening, unmatched channel coverage, enterprise-grade configurability and industry-defining AI.
How to Track Media Mentions in 3 Ways
Imagine that you're a fan of a particular tech brand, let's say, Apple. You're excited about the launch of the new iPhone and take to Twitter to share your enthusiasm. You might tag Apple, ask questions about the new features or simply express your excitement. This constant stream of user-generated content is a form of media mention.
By tracking media mentions, Apple can leverage such interactions to understand customer sentiment, identify potential issues and build stronger relationships with its audience.
In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of media mentions and how you can track them and leverage them in favor of your brand.
What is a media mention?
A media mention is any public reference to your brand, product or service. It can be as simple as someone tagging your brand’s name on social media or writing a review about your product.
With 9 out of 10 internet users active on social media every month, collectively spending over 10 billion hours online, tracking conversations around your brand is more important than ever. Monitoring media mentions gives you valuable insights into your online brand reputation, customer sentiment, and the competitive landscape—helping you stay ahead of the curve and respond quickly.
Mentions are a key indicator of a brand's popularity and relevance in people’s lives. By tracking mentions, brands can gain valuable insights into public perception, gather feedback from potential customers and take proactive steps to build a positive brand image.
3 Ways to track media mentions
Monitoring media mentions helps brands know how they are being perceived, identify opportunities to create a better brand image and fix any challenges. Here are three ways to achieve this:
1. Manual tracking
It is a traditional approach to tracking media mentions, in which you can search for brand mentions across various media outlets by typing keywords. While it does offer more control, it can be very time-consuming and may lead to missed mentions. This approach can, however, be used to monitor mentions for smaller businesses or track specific social media campaigns.
Here are a few ways to enhance manual tracking:
✔️Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases.
✔️Use the "-" symbol to exclude specific terms from your search.
✔️Use "site:domain.com" to search within a specific website.
Read more: Social media monitoring: Overview, trends and strategy
2. Google Alerts
This is a free tool that allows businesses to track their mentions automatically. Once you set an alert related to a certain keyword, the tool sends an email notification. It's easy to set up but may lack comprehensive coverage and real-time updates.
How to set up a Google Alert:
✅Go to google.com/alerts
✅Enter the keyword or phrase that you want to track.
✅Choose your preferred method (email or feed) for notification.
✅Adjust the frequency of alerts to your liking.
✅Click "Create Alert."
3. Social listening tools
While manual searches for mentions can be cumbersome, they can be combined with social listening tools to get better results. These tools offer in-depth insights into brand mentions, sentiment analysis and competitor activities. You can monitor conversations, including user-generated content (UGC), across various social media platforms, news websites, blogs and forums. Real-time actionable insights further help you drive greater efficiency.
How to use ‘mentions’ data
Leveraging mentions data is essential for brands to stay relevant, build stronger connections with their audience and outpace competitors in today's fast-paced digital landscape. Here’s how you can use it for your brand:
1. Brand reputation management
Tracking media mentions is important for any brand to understand how the audience perceives its products or services. It helps them take steps to create a positive brand image.
For example, when Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7, it faced significant backlash due to battery issues, which resulted in major negative media mentions for the brand. By monitoring mentions, Samsung quickly addressed the criticism through a comprehensive PR campaign. It immediately issued a public apology and assured the audience about fixing battery issues. This helped the brand pacify the situation.
Read More: Brand reputation management: A guide to get organized
2. Competitive intelligence
It is critical to track social mentions of your competitors. By monitoring these conversations, you gain valuable insights into what audiences love about them and where they fall short. These real-time perceptions can reveal opportunities to differentiate your brand, refine your messaging and stay ahead of the competition.
McDonald’s, for example, often markets its burgers as food that looks appetizing even after days. To counter this, Burger King came up with the "Moldy Whopper" campaign meant to be a slight dig at McDonald’s, implying that real food items actually decay. The campaign generated over 8.4 billion impressions for Burger King and a 14% spike in sales.
3. Customer insights
By analyzing social media conversations, brands can understand customer pain points and address them instantly. This improves customer satisfaction as they are getting heard in real-time and helps build customer loyalty eventually.
For example, Hilton Hotels receives thousands of tweets every day, distinguishing itself through its commitment to prompt and responsive customer engagement.
Deep dive 🥽: Consumer insights: The complete guide
4. Content strategy
More often than not, brands use trending topics in their day-to-day conversations. Tracking what’s trending on social media can help you identify trending topics and popular keywords to build relevant and engaging social media content strategy.
For example, during the 2024 Olympics, Nike tailored its content to promote its products. Its social media team posted a series of images, showcasing athletes wearing the brand’s sportswear. This helped Nike create a positive brand sentiment and raise brand awareness.
💡Pro tip: A brand's content shapes its social media presence, serving as a cornerstone for audience engagement. It should align with current trends, resonate with the target audience and effectively differentiate the brand from competitors. While creating a content strategy and posting manually can help, doing this for multiple platforms can be cumbersome.
AI-powered social publishing and engagement tools can help brands deliver content, engage customers, drive revenue and analyze performance across various social and messaging channels.
Upgrade your social media game with Sprinklr Social!
👉 Book a free demo today!
Final thoughts
Tracking media mentions is a critical component of any successful social media strategy, especially for large organizations. By monitoring online conversations, brands can gain valuable insights into their reputation, identify emerging social media trends and respond to customer feedback in real time.
While automation can significantly streamline the media monitoring process, it's essential to remember that no tool can replace human judgment. A blend of automated tools and manual analysis can provide the most comprehensive and accurate insights.
By effectively tracking media mentions, businesses can:
- Enhance brand reputation: Quickly address negative sentiment and proactively manage crises.
- Improve customer engagement: Respond to customer feedback and questions promptly.
- Identify emerging trends: Stay ahead of the curve by recognizing emerging trends and opportunities.
- Inform strategic decision-making: Use data-driven consumer insights to inform product development, marketing campaigns and business strategies.
Sprinklr Social is an essential platform for enterprises seeking to refine their social media strategy. By leveraging advanced social listening, data-driven analytics, personalized engagement, proactive crisis management and collaborative workflow integration, organizations can significantly enhance their brand presence, foster deeper connections with their audience and achieve measurable business outcomes.
Keen to get started? Book a Sprinklr Social demo today!
Frequently Asked Questions
When negative media mentions occur, it's important to respond promptly and professionally. The best way is to acknowledge the issue, apologize if necessary and offer a solution or explanation. Transparency and empathy are key to addressing a negative sentiment.
By tracking media mentions, you can identify individuals who frequently mention your brand positively. These individuals can be potential brand ambassadors or influencers, as they have a genuine interest in your brand.
To differentiate between meaningful mentions and spam, consider factors like the source of the mention, the context of the conversation and the engagement level.
Sentiment analysis can help you understand the overall sentiment of media mentions by categorizing them as positive, negative or neutral. It can also help you identify areas of strength and weakness in your brand perception.
Media mention tracking can provide valuable insights into your target audience's interests, concerns and language. By analyzing these insights, you can create content that resonates with your audience and drives social media engagement.
