Brand monitoring answers a simple question: what is being said about us in public, and does anything need a response? Brand monitoring tools and services sell dashboards for this, and they can be worth it for large teams. For many brands, a set of scheduled searches and one shared sheet do the job, and you keep every row.
This page explains what to monitor, which tools collect it, and how to run a weekly brand review.
Two kinds of mentions
Mentions in the wild. Posts that name your brand somewhere you did not start the conversation: a review on TikTok, a complaint on X (Twitter), a recommendation on Reddit, an industry post on LinkedIn. These are found by keyword search.
Reactions on your own channels. Comments under your own posts. These are found by collecting the comments of the posts you published.
Both matter. The first shows how the brand travels without you; the second shows how your audience responds when you speak.
The search tools
Each of these takes keywords and returns matching public posts:
- : videos TikTok search shows for each keyword, plus top results and search suggestions.
- : public posts, reels and popular posts by keyword.
- : public X (Twitter) posts by keyword.
- : public Reddit posts by keyword, across the site or within one subreddit. Reddit brand monitoring is worth its own line in your plan, because Reddit threads often rank in search results for "is [brand] any good".
- : public Facebook posts and videos by keyword.
- : public LinkedIn posts by keyword, useful for B2B brands and employer reputation.
The comment tools
- Facebook Comments Scraper collects the public comments on your Facebook posts, reels and videos.
- collects the public comments on your Instagram posts and reels.
Give them the links of your last few weeks of posts. The comments are the fastest feedback loop you have.
A weekly brand review in five steps
- Keyword list. Brand name, misspellings, product names, campaign hashtags. Keep it under fifteen terms.
- Schedules. Save each search as an Apify task and run them all daily or weekly. Add a comments task for your recent posts.
- One sheet. Stack the exports. The tools share field names (
text,createdAt,metrics,url), so the columns line up. - Triage. Mark each new mention: needs a reply, worth sharing internally, or just noted.
- Summary. Total mentions, the split by platform, the three most engaged mentions with links, and anything that needs action.
Examples of what turns up
- A how-to video about your product on TikTok that is getting more views than your own content. You might ask the creator if you can share it.
- A Reddit thread where people compare you with two rivals. The points they raise are your next FAQ.
- A cluster of posts on X (Twitter) about a checkout error, an hour before support sees the first ticket.
- An industry roundup on LinkedIn that compares your product with two others, which is part of the brand too.
Good habits
- Read before you count. Brand names that are common words pull in noise. Refine the keywords until most results are about you.
- Respond on the platform. These tools read; replies happen in the app, by a person.
- Keep the history. A year of mentions shows seasons, campaign effects and slow shifts no single week shows.
Brand monitoring here is about the brand: its products, campaigns and reputation. The tools read public posts and comments only, run on Apify and are paid for through your Apify account, where each Store page shows the current price per 1,000 results.