How to Monitor Your Brand and Keywords

This guide will show you three ways

Matthew Rayson avatar
Written by Matthew Rayson
Updated over a week ago

Overview

Brand, Keyword, or Competitor monitoring can describe many activities. Here's what we mean when we talk about monitoring with BuzzSumo: 

  1. Tracking mentions of your brand, keywords, or competitors in media (e.g. blog posts or articles)

  2. Tracking mentions of your brand, keywords, or competitors in questions asked in forums

This article will help you figure out where and how to monitor any of these types of mentions. 

Features You'll Need

Method #1 - Tracking mentions of your brand, keywords, or competitors in media (e.g. blog posts or articles)

Alerts notify you when your brand has been mentioned in an article on the internet, such as in a blog post or news article. Alerts crawl the full text of of articles 

These mentions are normally delivered with an hour or two of their publication time, enabling you to reply, comment, or share the content as appropriate. 

To begin, navigate to Monitoring and create an alert for your brand name. If your brand name is not unique to you, please include or exclude additional terms to get better results. 

Select "Monitoring" and click "Create New Alert

Select "Brands"

Include or exclude additional keywords if needed. 

You can also further refine the alert by using the filters shown below. 

For example, you can restrict results to a particular language and to content that has received more than 50 shares. 

Choose to get results via email in real time or as a daily digest.

The Monitoring Dashboard will keep you updated on brand mentions as shown below.

Identify questions asked about your brand online

Discussion forums and large websites with comments and questions are an important area to monitor for questions about your brand. 

In many ways these questions are more important than other mentions as they specifically invite people to provide answers about your brand. You will want to monitor them and intervene in these discussions. 

Even if you don't decide to join the discussion in the forum, the questions that people have about your brand provide great blog post ideas!

Competitor comparisons are often phrased as questions. For example, below are just a few questions about SEO tools

If your brand is mentioned in a competitor comparison question, you may want to visit the forum to comment on the existing answers or provide another response. 

To help you discover questions being asked about your brand, our Question Analyzer crawls over 100,000 different forums including the entirety of Quora and Reddit. 

You can search the data by brand name or any other keyword.

Results are organized and displayed by type of question. See the results for Nike below.

Underneath the word cloud, you will also find a list of real online results.

Click on the question to go directly to the forum, where you will be able to see the answers and comments. 

Identify people who share your brand content

It is useful to know who is sharing your content online. For example, you might want to contact and thank people who have shared your content. This can be a helpful way to build relationships, particularly with influencers that have shared your content.

To see who has shared the content you've published on your website go to the Influencers section of BuzzSumo and choose 'Shared articles from' using the drop-down menu. Then, enter the relevant domains you wish to search for. 

The export option makes it easy to create a tailored advertising audience for Twitter. Repeat the process to find and reach out to your competitors' brand champions.  

Also try entering your brand name as a keyword in Search Content Shared.

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