What is a brand mention?
As the name suggests, the term brand mention refers to any instance your brand is mentioned by another party. In most cases, this happens in the form of social media posts, blog posts, online articles, reviews, and customer feedback.
If you wish to learn more about this concept, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: Why are brand mentions important?
Brand mentions are important not only because they give your brand more visibility (i.e., free marketing), but also because they give you an idea of what people think about your brand. Of course, when you know what people think about your brand, you can take the necessary steps to either improve or capitalise.
Say you have a lot of negative brand mentions online. You can use them to figure out exactly what you need to do to improve your brand’s reputation, retain more of your customers, and grow your customer base.
But what about positive brand mentions?
Well, when you know what people love about your brand, then you can double down on it. For example, if you find that your customers are raving about how quickly you deliver their orders, then you can highlight this aspect of your brand in your next marketing and advertising campaign since you already have a lot of social proof to support your claim.
But that is not all you can do with positive brand mentions. You can also use it to get more quality backlinks to your website—which brings us to the next point:
Question #2: How does brand mention affect SEO?
Brand mention affects SEO in two ways:
- Driving more traffic to your website due to the increased brand visibility and awareness in creates
- By providing you with opportunities to get more backlinks to your website
The first way is pretty self-explanatory. Because brand mentions bring your brand in front of more people, more people visit your website to learn more about it and what it does. As a general rule, the more brand mentions you have, the more interest your brand gets.
The second way, on the other hand, needs a little more explanation. It works this way:
Someone mentions your brand > you ask them to link back to your website > you get a backlink
Since the person or company that mentioned your brand is most likely already interested in it, there is a big chance that they will agree to link to your website. The more of these backlinks you have, the more Google will view your website as an authority in whatever niche you are operating in, resulting in your website ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Question #3: How can I get more brand mentions?
There are a lot of different ways to get more brand mentions. The easiest one is to create brand evangelists by simply providing your customers with truly exceptional products, services, and support.
But you can also run promotions designed to get people to talk about your brand, hire influencers, regularly publish share-worthy content, or go viral.
Unfortunately, the last one is not fully under your control. If you manage to pull it off, however, you are guaranteed to get an avalanche of brand mentions across different social media platforms in a short time.
Question #4: How do I track my brand mentions?
You can track your brand mentions using tools such as Mentionlytics and Mention.
These tools work by scanning websites, blogs, forums, and social media for mentions of your brand and providing you with powerful tools to make sense of these mentions and generate reports. Some even come with social media marketing features designed to make it easier for you to create content for and engage with your audience across different platforms.