Knowing when your brand gets mentioned online can help you understand how your business is being talked about, identify PR opportunities, and keep up with what competitors are doing.
The challenge is finding those mentions consistently without spending hours searching for them.
Fortunately, there are several ways to track media mentions. Some are free and simple, while others offer more advanced monitoring, alerts, sentiment analysis, and competitive intelligence.
Here are five ways to track media mentions.
1. Use Featured Media Monitoring
Featured Media Monitoring gives founders, marketers, and PR teams a simple way to track recent media mentions and competitor coverage.
Logged-in users can search for recent mentions through Featured’s chat interface using questions such as:
- “Where has my company been mentioned recently?”
- “Who links to my competitor but not me?”
Featured can also identify whether a discovered mention is positive, neutral, or negative, helping you quickly understand how your brand is being represented.
If you want ongoing monitoring, paid users can create automated workflows that run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. These workflows can notify you when new brand or competitor coverage appears, so you can catch mentions while they are fresh and use that information to inform your PR and business strategy.
Featured also gives users a place to organize their coverage. Users can manually add media mentions to their ledger or bulk upload mentions from a spreadsheet.
Pricing: Featured has a free plan, with paid plans starting at $29 per month when billed annually.
2. Use Brand24
Brand24 is a media monitoring and social listening platform designed to help businesses track mentions across a wide range of online sources. It monitors news, blogs, forums, social media, videos, podcasts, reviews, and other sources.
You can use Brand24 to monitor your company, products, competitors, or specific keywords. The platform includes features such as sentiment analysis, mention volume, reach, engagement, alerts, and reporting.
One advantage of Brand24 is the breadth of information it provides around each mention. Rather than simply showing you that your brand was mentioned, it can help you understand where the conversation is happening, how much attention it is receiving, and what people are saying.
Brand24 offers several plans based on the number of keywords and mentions you need to monitor, making it more suited to teams that want comprehensive monitoring and analytics.
Pricing: Brand24 starts at $249 per month, or $199 per month when billed annually, for its Individual plan. A 14-day free trial is available.
3. Use Mention
Mention is a monitoring and social listening platform that tracks brands, topics, and keywords across the web and social media.
The platform monitors sources including news sites, blogs, forums, review websites, and social networks. It also provides sentiment analysis, share-of-voice metrics, competitive analysis, alerts, and reporting.
Mention can be useful for companies that want to monitor more than traditional media coverage. For example, a team can use it to track how a brand is being discussed across both news coverage and social conversations.
The platform also supports competitive monitoring, allowing teams to follow competitors and compare their presence across the conversations being tracked.
Pricing: Mention’s current plans start at $599/month, billed annually. Custom pricing is available for larger teams and requirements.
4. Use Meltwater
Meltwater is a comprehensive media intelligence platform built for PR, communications, and marketing teams with more extensive monitoring needs.
The platform monitors traditional and digital media along with social media, podcasts, and broadcast sources. Teams can use it to track brands and competitors, set up alerts, analyze sentiment, benchmark performance, and create reports.
Meltwater is particularly suited to larger organizations that need to monitor multiple markets, brands, regions, or types of media. Its broader platform also includes tools for media relations, social listening, and analytics.
Because Meltwater is designed as a more comprehensive media intelligence platform, it can be a better fit for organizations with dedicated communications teams and more complex monitoring requirements.
Pricing: Meltwater uses custom pricing based on the products, coverage, users, data volume, and requirements of each organization. The company publishes indicative ranges starting at $10,000 per year for Starter, $25,000 per year for Pro, and $130,000 per year for Enterprise.
5. Set Up Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most accessible ways to track media mentions.
You can create alerts for your company name, products, executives, competitors, or specific topics. Google then sends you notifications when it finds new results that match your alerts.
For example, a company might create alerts for its brand name, its founder, its major products, and its top competitors.
Google Alerts is a good option for businesses that want basic monitoring without paying for a dedicated platform. It can also be useful as a starting point for a small business that does not receive a large volume of media coverage.
The tradeoff is that Google Alerts provides less organization, analysis, and competitive intelligence than dedicated media monitoring platforms. If you need to monitor several brands or keywords regularly, a dedicated tool can make the process more manageable.
Pricing: Google Alerts is free.
Which Way Should You Use to Track Media Mentions?
The best way to track media mentions depends on your needs, budget, and how much coverage you want to monitor.
Google Alerts can be a good starting point if you want a free and simple solution. Tools like Brand24 and Mention provide broader monitoring and more detailed analysis across web and social sources. Meltwater offers a more comprehensive media intelligence solution for larger organizations.
Featured sits between a simple search and a full-scale media intelligence platform. Users can search for recent brand and competitor mentions through Featured’s chat for free, while paid users can automate ongoing monitoring with recurring workflows.
Whichever approach you choose, consistently tracking media mentions can help you understand how your brand is being covered, stay informed about competitors, and turn media coverage into useful PR and business insights.
