BrandMentions Review: Social Media & Web Monitoring Tool

What Is BrandMentions and Why Does It Matter?

Are people talking about your brand online? If you don't know the answer to that question, you might be missing out on important conversations — both positive and negative. BrandMentions is a social media and web monitoring tool that tracks when and where your brand (or your competitors) gets mentioned across the internet.

There are two core reasons you'd want a tool like this. First, you want to join conversations about your brand and make sure they're heading in a positive — or at least accurate — direction. Second, you might want to monitor where your competitors are being discussed so you can make sure your brand is part of that conversation too. Once you start thinking about it, the use cases multiply quickly.

The big question for smaller businesses is whether a tool like this actually works when your brand doesn't have massive recognition yet. That's exactly what I tested by monitoring my own channel, That LTD Life, which is far from a household name.

Breaking Down the AppSumo Deal

The deal structure on AppSumo is fairly straightforward with two tiers. A single code runs $49 and a double stack doubles most of the limits. You get 20 keywords per project on a single code (40 with a double), 100,000 instant mentions and 15,000 historical mentions, and up to five projects.

It's worth understanding the difference between instant and historical mentions. Instant mentions are recent data you can search and retrieve quickly. Historical mentions dig further back in time and provide much deeper data — you can even set up notifications as historical mentions surface. The keyword limit is per project, so if you buy a double code, you'll need multiple projects to take advantage of all 40 keywords.

The double stack also upgrades you from daily alerts to real-time alerts, extends storage history from one year to five years, and unlocks white-label reports plus data export. If you're managing reputation for clients and need to jump into conversations as they happen, those real-time alerts alone might justify the second code.

Setting Up Your First Project

Getting started is quick. You create a project, type in your brand name, and BrandMentions tries to auto-detect your web presence. When I typed in "That LTD," it found my brand immediately — even one as small as mine. It automatically located the website and Twitter profile, though I had to manually add the Facebook page.

Next, you choose the market to monitor. By default it's set to worldwide and any language, which works for most people. There are tons of country and language options, but one limitation stands out: you can only select one country or worldwide, not a custom set of countries. Same goes for languages — it's either one specific language or all of them. You can't say "monitor English and Spanish" simultaneously.

Once you confirm your settings, BrandMentions starts researching your brand and pulling in mentions. For a small review channel like mine, it found six mentions right out of the gate — mostly our own YouTube videos, but also some interesting discoveries like videos where our channel shows up in YouTube's recommended sidebar.

Exploring Mentions, Sentiment, and Filtering

After letting the tool run for a bit and pulling in historical data (which can take up to an hour), my dashboard showed 126 overall mentions, eight backlinks, 35 positive mentions, and six negative mentions. BrandMentions does sentiment analysis on every mention, categorizing them by mood.

The sentiment detection isn't always perfect for context. For example, a video titled "Why I Switched From AWeber and GetResponse to Sendy" got flagged as negative — but that's because the overall tone discusses moving away from products, not because my brand was mentioned negatively. It's something to keep in mind when reviewing results.

Filtering is where things get powerful. You can create custom segments based on criteria like domain influence. For instance, setting a domain influence threshold of 50 or higher filters down to only major sites like YouTube and Facebook. You can save these segments for quick access later. The tool also categorizes mentions into buckets like important, unlinked, trash, and spam, and you can bookmark key mentions or trash irrelevant ones.

Reports and White Labeling

Creating reports is dead simple — just hit the create button, name your report, and customize which data sections to include. You can add a cover page, change the title, leave a note for your client, and toggle categories on or off. Don't need the language breakdown? Turn it off. Mention list not relevant? Remove it.

The generated PDF reports are actually quite attractive, with clean graphs and hyperlinked mentions that clients can click to visit the original source. However, there's a catch on the single code: the reports are heavily branded with BrandMentions' logo and purple color scheme on every page. If you're doing this for yourself, no big deal. But if you want to look professional handing reports to clients, you'll want the double stack for white-label reports that strip out the BrandMentions branding.

Quick Research and Competitor Monitoring

One of the handier features is Quick Research, which lets you pull data on any brand without setting up a full project. I searched for "AppSumo" and within moments had 231 mentions climbing steadily, broken down between web and social mentions with a nice progress indicator.

If you find that the quick research results are valuable enough to track long-term, you can convert it into a full monitored project with a single click. This is great for scoping out a competitor before committing one of your project slots to ongoing monitoring.

The influencers section is also worth checking out. It shows public personas talking about your brand and the top sites where you're mentioned. While this info is available at a glance on the dashboard, the dedicated sidebar view gives you much more detail to work with.

Filtering Out Irrelevant Mentions

If your brand name is common or shared with other entities, BrandMentions gives you tools to clean things up. I tested this by monitoring "Dave Swift" — a name shared with a professional skateboarder and a professional bassist. Out of 36 initial mentions, almost all were about those other Dave Swifts.

In the project settings under keywords, you can add required keywords (terms that must appear alongside your brand name) and excluded keywords (terms that should disqualify a mention). I excluded words like "bass," "bassist," "skateboard," and "skate," which trimmed results from 36 down to 20. You can also choose to have previous mentions re-evaluated against the new filters.

The filtering isn't foolproof — a skateboarding video that doesn't actually contain the word "skateboard" will still slip through, and excluding "skateboard" won't catch "skateboarding" unless you add that variation too. But for brands like Apple that need to separate computers from fruit, these keyword controls are essential.

Final Verdict: 8.8 out of 10

BrandMentions earns an 8.8 out of 10. It's a really solid product that's been around for a few years and shows no signs of going anywhere. The tool was clearly built with agencies in mind — the project-based organization, client management features, and white-label reporting all point to professional use.

For a small brand like That LTD Life, social monitoring isn't mission-critical yet. But if your brand is getting mentioned online and you're not tracking those conversations, you're leaving opportunities on the table. If you already have Civic Feed or Awario and you're happy, there's probably no reason to add BrandMentions unless you specifically need the white-label reporting or extra project slots.

Between Civic Feed, BrandMentions, and Awario, the social monitoring space has solid options. BrandMentions stands out for its agency-friendly features, clean reporting, and reliable mention detection — even for brands that are still building their presence.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.