You can monitor mentions of your brand with free tools and a disciplined weekly routine: set up web alerts for your name and variations, save searches on the social platforms you use, check review sites, and log what you find. Paid listening tools add volume and analysis, but a small business can catch most important mentions without them.
What to watch for
List the terms people might use before you set anything up:
- Your business name, plus common misspellings and abbreviations
- Product or service names
- Founder or spokesperson names
- Your campaign hashtags
- Your main competitors (to see how people talk about the category)
- A few phrases customers use for the problem you solve
Keep this list in one shared document so any team member can update it.
Free and low-cost methods
Web alerts
Google’s help page on Google Alerts explains that you enter a topic, optionally adjust settings, and receive emails whenever matching search results are found. You can set how often notifications arrive, the types of sites, language, region, how many results you see and which account receives them. Put brand names in quotation marks to reduce noise, and create separate alerts for each name or variation.
Alerts only reflect what a search index finds. They will miss most private groups, direct messages and a lot of social content, so treat them as one layer.
Platform searches
Search your brand name and hashtags directly on each platform you use, and save the searches if the platform allows. Check tagged posts, comments and messages. This is manual, which is why a fixed time slot matters.
Review and map listings
Check your listings on the review platforms and map services your customers use. Note new reviews, ratings changes and questions.
A weekly routine
| Step | Time | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Read alert emails | 10 minutes | Items flagged: praise, question, complaint, risk |
| Search each platform | 15 minutes | Mentions not caught by alerts |
| Check reviews and questions | 10 minutes | Items needing a reply |
| Log and assign | 10 minutes | Short log: where, what, action, owner |
| Monthly summary | 30 minutes | Themes, volume, response times |
The times are suggestions; adjust to your volume. Consistency matters more than length.
How to respond
Sort each mention into one of four buckets: praise (thank them, consider asking permission to feature it, see user-generated content), question (answer publicly where helpful), complaint (acknowledge, move the detail to a private channel), and false or abusive content (document and report).
On reviews, the ACCC’s guidance on online reviews is clear that suppressing, editing or removing genuine negative reviews may mislead consumers, and that businesses can ask a platform to remove a false review or respond to it publicly. The healthy approach is to reply honestly, not to hide criticism.
What to measure
Count mentions, split by positive, neutral and negative, and track response time. Link spikes to campaigns or events. These counts give context to the broader metrics in measuring creative campaign performance. Sentiment sorted by hand is slow but accurate for small volumes; automated sentiment scoring is imperfect with sarcasm and slang.
Limitations
Free monitoring is incomplete. It will not see everything, it relies on people doing the routine, and it will not warn you the minute something goes wrong. If your brand is large, regulated or frequently in the news, paid tools or an agency are worth assessing. For most small businesses, the first priority is simply to notice and reply. Fit the routine into your wider plan using a digital marketing strategy for a growing business.
Where Radiance Impact fits
Radiance Impact’s Growth and Marketing division works on social, campaigns and strategy, including how brands respond to audiences. To talk about setting up a monitoring routine, contact the team.
Sources
- Create an alert or manage alerts, Google Search Help
- Online reviews for products and services, ACCC
