BrandMentions
Starts at $49 a month
Pros
- Excellent user interface
- Automatic scheduling of reports
- Extensive filtering options
- Great tool for agencies
Cons
- White-labeled reports and real-time alerts are available only in the agency plan
Irrespective of the niche you are operating in or the type of business whether it be consulting, e-commerce, blogging, running an agency, etc., the competition is extremely fierce in an online business.
It is imperative that you are on your toes at all the times failing which there is a long list of competitors pouncing on to overtake.
However, the web is a vast place and it is practically impossible to keep checking about all the feedbacks your brand and business receive across users from various channels.
This is exactly the problem BrandMentions aims to solve for business owners and agencies serving multiple clients.
Is it a good tool that will help to manage your or client's online brand reputation? Let's find that out.
Sign up and initial set-up
After the sign-up process is done, the initial setup is quite a breeze. Just type your brand name and the system recognizes it in case it has been mentioned previously across the web.
Select the brand name and then connect the corresponding website and all the necessary social channels.
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Once all the social channels are connected, the next step is to choose if you would like to monitor mentions worldwide or from a specific country or language. This feature is really useful for non-English websites and brands.
Dashboard
Once the set-up is complete, you are welcomed to the dashboard with all the impressions and mentions pulled from all across the web.
The interface is clean and intuitive with so many filters that can be set to get the right type of mentions or keyword you want the data for.
On the left side of the dashboard, all the mentions are sorted in an interface similar to an e-mail client listing the mentions as important, bookmarked, unlinked, trash, spam, and tags.
The unlinked mention type is the list is very interesting and useful. What exactly this does is to show all the places where your brand name, maybe a blog post, video, social media post was mentioned but did not link back to the website.
This makes it easy to reach out to the person or website owner who has mentioned your brand or content and ask for a friendly favor to link to your website.
As always, links do a massive job when it comes to SEO and this is one of the easiest ways to earn quality backlinks to boost your brand's rankings.
This is one of my most favorite features in BrandMentions.
Notifications and alerts
It is possible to set notification alerts every time your brand gets a mention.
This is cool as it lets you be instantly known if in case of any negative mentions your brand receives and you can reach out to the person to sort the issue out before it gets blown out.
Before setting up the alerts, it is essential to activate real-time monitoring under the project settings.
Once it is turned on, alerts can be set up with a whole lot of excellent filtering options.
For larger brands that get a lot of mentions consistently, alerts can be set only for the mentions with negative sentiment.
Reports
This is a feature that agencies would definitely love. Reports are quite detailed with a lot of information that could be presented in a beautiful and visual manner.
Again, there are so many useful filtering options that could be used to display specific information in the reports and leave out that are not needed.
Reports can also be scheduled to be sent to clients at specific time periods with a personalized message and by selecting automate email reports in the schedule options.
Agencies would be well served by going for the white label option in the company plan as the branding in the reports is quite profound.
Pricing
There are three plans in total with the difference in the number of keywords, number of mentions and the number of projects.
It is also to be noted that real-time monitoring and white labeling of the reports are available only in the company plan.
It is possible to add team members only in the growing business and company plan.
Alternatives?
There are the likes of Mention, BuzzSumo, SocialAnimal, and Awario if you need a more established and robust tool.
BuuzSumo is perhaps the best alternative if you are focused on content marketing.
However, my personal favorite is Social Animal which has the mentions coupled with so many other powerful features from deep content research and influencer searches.
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Support
Live chat support is available on the website but not within the app itself. The response times were really quick and it was easy to get in touch with the Founder directly for any important queries.
The help center documentation is quite extensive and covers all the features in detail.
Conclusion
To conclude, is it a good tool? Well, definitely yes.
However, will it be useful for every type of business? That is not so certain as a small or upcoming business with little to no brand recognition might not find the data very useful to grow their business.
That being said, I feel the best use case is for agencies who manage multiple clients of various sizes. The automatic scheduling of reports and the actual reports with so many metrics and information will surely get a positive impression from the clients.
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There might be some other user cases, but for any sort of agency, it looks the perfect fit and worth trying out.