Use Web Scraping for Brand Monitoring

The old saying that any press is good press may be losing its truth in an era when press and reviews are at our fingertips 24/7. What steps can a company take to protect its reputation in this accelerating social world?

By extracting brand monitoring data, business intelligence (BI) teams can both capitalize on positive publicity and mitigate negative sentiment. A comprehensive BI strategy recognizes the multifaceted nature of online brand monitoring and sentiment analysis by collecting data from many sources and analyzing the many factors that constitute a brand's online reputation.

However, manually collecting data for brand monitoring is no easy task. Fortunately, we can now easily automate brand monitoring using intelligently designed data scrapers.

In this guide, we'll walk you through several common and important use cases that help organizations gain valuable insights and monitor their brand.

•     Brand reputation
•     Investment decision making
•     Product development
•     Policy and campaigns

Brand Reputation

In today's highly competitive market, monitoring and managing your brand's online presence is a top priority to protect your reputation. If you are not tracking your brand online or monitoring how your products are positioned and evaluated, you may find yourself in a situation where your brand's reputation is damaged and your business suffers.

Investment Decision Making

Research in the financial industry has shown that news articles and social media opinions can directly affect the stock market. Both informational and subjective aspects of online articles can influence volatility, stock price, trading volume, and market activity.

The market moves fast, and being even half a step ahead of competitors can be incredibly valuable. If many companies are receiving the same traditional data, investors can differentiate their strategy (and increase their returns) by incorporating brand monitoring data into their decision-making process.

Product Development

Consider for a moment the immense volume of reviews, forum posts, customer support tickets, and social media endorsements that are constantly circulating. A single negative review can cost a company many sales, but without comprehensive data utilization technology, companies often lack actionable insights on how to modify their products, let alone develop new ones.

Brand monitoring based on data obtained through scraping enables product development teams to gain data-driven insights into what changes customers want and how well the product is performing. Thus, brand monitoring is not just a retrospective tool but a vital part of the product creation, planning, and design process.

Policy and Election Campaigns

Political opinions are often among the most emotionally charged views that people hold. Therefore, sentiment analysis pairs well with politics, as voter behavior, campaign success, and party shifts are rarely completely rational.

Looking at past elections, we see that calculated expectations do not always become reality. Sufficient attention must be paid to the sentiments expressed regarding campaigns, candidates, legislative bills, and presidential approval ratings.

All these topics are constantly discussed on forums, social media, and in article comments, making scraping an ideal—if not the only—method for extracting such data.

We hope that some of these interesting examples of brand monitoring data usage have inspired you to incorporate such data into your own workflows and innovate in your industry. Investors, government officials, and business leaders can leverage the vast opportunities that brand monitoring data provides to fully realize their potential and equip their operations with the most effective, world-class solutions currently available.

As the Internet continues to evolve, the volume of data it generates grows with it, opening new opportunities for all types of organizations to improve their processes and make more informed decisions. Therefore, we firmly believe that now is the perfect time to act. By integrating brand monitoring data streams into your organizational processes, you can ensure your organization is protected from disruptions and fully prepared for tomorrow.