How to monitor your brand online in five steps

Here is how to monitor your brand online: list the names and topics that matter, decide which kind of mention you need to hear about, and set up a monitor that checks the web and social media for you. The quickest way to do that without drowning in results is AyeWatch, where you describe the mentions you want in plain English and get only the matching ones.

Here is the full process in five steps.

Step 1: List what people call you

Write down every name a customer or reporter might use: the company name, product names, common misspellings, the founder's name, and any old name you used to trade under. Add a short list of competitors and one or two phrases that describe your category. This list is the raw material for every alert you set up.

Step 2: Decide what counts as worth knowing

Not every mention needs attention. A directory listing or a routine press release mention is noise. A one-star review that is getting replies, a thread asking whether your product is safe, or a news piece quoting an unhappy customer is not.

Write one sentence per concern. For example:

• "Complaints about Acme's refunds or customer support."
• "News or posts that question the safety of Acme products."
• "Articles that compare Acme with Beta Corp."

Step 3: Pick a tool that matches your sentences

Keyword alert services, such as Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts, are free and send an email whenever your words appear. They work for a rare name with few mentions. For anything busier, they send every match and you do the sorting.

AyeWatch works from the sentences you wrote in step 2. Its AI reads each new article, post or page change and alerts you only when the item fits the description, with a summary and links to the sources.

Step 4: Cover the places your customers talk

News and blogs are only part of it. Complaints often start on Reddit, X, YouTube or TikTok. AyeWatch has separate monitor types for X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, plus an Internet type for news, blogs and forums and a Webpages type that watches one page, such as your listing on a review site.

Give each monitor its own sentence. A Reddit monitor for "posts asking whether Acme is worth it" will pick up different conversations from a news monitor for "reporting on Acme layoffs or lawsuits".

Step 5: Route alerts to the right person

Decide who reads which alerts and where. In AyeWatch you choose channels per topic. Every plan includes the in-app feed and push notifications on the web, iOS and Android. Paid plans add email, a daily digest, Slack, Discord and webhooks, so urgent topics can go to a shared Slack channel and slower ones to a morning email.

Agree on a simple rule for urgent alerts: who checks it, how soon, and who can reply in public.

Keep tuning

For the first week, read every alert and ask whether it deserved to reach you. If not, tighten the sentence or mute the topic. If something important came from elsewhere first, add a new monitor for it.

When to use something else

If your job includes monthly sentiment and share-of-voice reports for leadership, a listening suite such as Brand24 is the better fit. For catching the posts you need to act on, AyeWatch is the simpler and cheaper choice. You can set up your first brand monitor on the free preview, no credit card needed.