How to Use Brand24 to Monitor Your Brand and Two Competitors

The short answer: create one Brand24 project for your brand and one for each competitor, enter the names people really type (brand, product, hashtag, domain), add required and excluded words on day one because exclusions only filter mentions collected afterwards, mute the authors and sources that add noise, set storm alerts and a Slack channel for spikes, compare the three projects in the Comparison tab each month, and let an AI assistant summarise the week through Brand24's MCP server while a person checks every mention it quotes.

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Listening goes wrong in two opposite ways. Either the keyword is so broad that the feed fills with fruit recipes and unrelated companies, or it is so narrow that the one angry post that mattered never arrives. Most of the setup below is about the space between those two. For plans and prices, see the Brand24 glossary entry.

Before you create the projects:

1. Add up the mention budget. For example, if your brand draws about 4,000 mentions a month and each rival 2,500, the three projects need 4,000 + 2 x 2,500 = 9,000 a month, inside Team's 10,000 (pricing page, checked on 24 October 2026). Mentions over the limit are charged as overage, so measure during the trial before you choose.
2. Collect the names you already use. Your paid search keyword list, your product names, the campaign hashtags and the common misspellings in your inbox are the first keywords. You do not have to invent them.
3. Decide what a good month looks like. Pick two numbers to report: your share of voice against the two rivals, and the share of storm alerts that turned out to need action. The first month gives you the baseline.

What you need

• The trial or a plan. The 14-day trial runs on Pro with 10 keywords and up to 30,000 mentions, refreshed every 24 hours, per the trial article.
• A Slack workspace, if alerts should reach the team where it already works.
• Time. New projects start with a sample of the last 30 days and collect forward, per the historical data article.

Step 1: Create your brand's project

Type the keywords separated by commas and pick a language: all languages for a broad view, or one if only one market matters, per the first project article. The same article notes a mention limit per project, so selecting a language also saves budget.

Step 2: Write keywords Brand24 can match

The keywords article lists what works: single words, short phrases, hashtags, short links and domains. It lists what does not: full URLs and email addresses, which rarely appear in posts, whole sentences nobody types, and generic words. Add your domain as a keyword too, since domains are on the list of forms that work.

Step 3: Add required and excluded words now, not later

If your brand name is a common word, require a second word next to it. Brand24's own example is Apple: requiring "mac" keeps the computer and drops the fruit, and a second line with "iphone" catches both products, per the required and excluded keywords article. Excluded words remove posts, but only from mentions collected after you add them; earlier mentions stay in the project. So set exclusions when you create the project, and add the hashtag form of each excluded word too.

Step 4: Give each competitor its own project

You can put every competitor in one project, but the first project article recommends separate projects when you want to compare them, because the analytics then stay per brand. Repeat steps 1 to 3 for each rival, with the same language setting as yours, or the comparison will be uneven.

Step 5: Clear the remaining noise

The non-relevant mentions article offers several tools, worth trying in this order: mute an author or domain that keeps posting irrelevant content; exclude a whole source type in Project Settings, Sources; exclude countries or languages where another company shares your name; and, on plans with AI topic analysis, delete an unrelated topic, which removes its mentions, and add its telltale words to the excluded list.

Step 6: Set storm alerts

Storm alerts notify you when mention volume or social reach changes by a percentage you choose. They are on by default. Set them in the project options, Reports tab. Brand24's storm alerts article gives the arithmetic: if you usually get 10 posts a day and one day get 20, a 200% setting tells you. Expect to tune it for a few weeks until the alerts that arrive are the ones you would have wanted.

Step 7: Send mentions to Slack

In the Projects window, click Add Slack notification, choose the project and, optionally, a saved filter, click Connect, authorise your Slack workspace and pick a channel, per the Slack article. Connect your brand project first and a filtered view of negative mentions second; leave the competitors out of Slack unless someone will act on them.

Step 8: Compare the three projects

The Comparison tab suggests related projects and shows them side by side for any date range: total mentions, positive and negative mentions, reach, Presence Score, share of voice and the channels where each brand is discussed, per the project comparison article. Take the same month each time.

Step 9: Let an assistant summarise, and check what it quotes

Brand24's MCP server connects project data to an AI assistant. In Claude, go to Settings, Connectors, Add Custom Connector, enter https://mcp.brand24.com/v1/mcp and sign in with OAuth; ChatGPT has an official Brand24 app, per the MCP article. Each Monday, ask for the main discussions about your project and each rival in the past week and which authors drove them. Before anything goes into a report or a reply, a person opens each mention the summary relies on in Brand24 and reads it. An assistant can compress a week of posts into a sentence that no single post says.

What Brand24's guides warn about

• Late exclusions leave older mentions in place.
• Full URLs and email addresses as keywords return little or nothing.
• History stops at 30 days for a new project.
• Trial limits: 100 mentions a day from X and Instagram.

Reading the month

Report share of voice and the negative mentions that needed a response. Brand24 also offers AVE, which prices coverage as if it were bought advertising. A listening tool's value metric is designed to make listening look valuable, so keep AVE out of the board pack unless you can defend the conversion behind it.

FAQ

Why does my new project show nothing?

Usually the keyword is too new, too long or a full URL. The keywords article suggests a brand name, product, hashtag or domain instead, and support can check a project that stays empty.

How quickly do new mentions appear?

It depends on the plan: every 12 hours on Individual, hourly on Team and in real time from Pro up, per the pricing page.

Can I track Instagram hashtags?

Yes. Hashtags are one of the keyword forms the keywords article recommends. During the trial, X and Instagram are capped at 100 mentions a day.