Brand management and social media pros understand the importance of monitoring their brand online. Since customers frequently conduct their own online research before deciding to purchase your product or engage in the sales process for your service, it’s important to be involved in the discussion.

If you’re new to digital marketing, social media or online brand management, or if your brand is new, you’ll need to use an online brand monitoring tool. Monitoring your brand online can help you respond to questions, address negative reviews and comments, increase your brand’s visibility, provide customer service and build trust. It’s essential for building a strong online reputation.

A few years ago, you could accomplish this by using Google Alerts. It’s free, but no longer as effective as many other available tools. You can manually search tweets and Facebook posts, but that’s time consuming and doesn’t cover other social media channels.

The tools you select should be largely based upon your goals, needs and budget. They range from a starting point of simply making reviewing and responding to social comments on the largest sites easier, to monitoring thousands of brand conversations on a daily basis, with metrics, sentiment ratings and competitive analysis.

Simple or Free Online Brand Management Tools

These services allow you to see the conversations about your brand.

• Mention
• Social Mention
• Hootsuite
• Brand24
• Reputology
• SEMrush’s Social Media Tool 
• Trackur
• Google – Alerts and Analytics

More Sophisticated Online Brand Management Tools

As your brand grows and your conversation levels increase, you may want to graduate to a more sophisticated tool that will allow you to identify opportunities, trends and track competitors. Consider:

• Salesforce.com’s Social Studio
• Sysomos
• Brandwatch
• Netbase
• BrandsEye

It’s a good idea to remember that online brand monitoring tools can generate a lot of noise, so you need to monitor and decide which mentions require a response and action. Many seasoned online marketers use a combination of free and paid tools to accomplish all of their goals.

A great way to start is to sign up for a couple of free trials for services that address your immediate need and see which performs the best over 30 days. Start small, and build from your first success.