Notify is a free keyword monitoring service to monitor mention of brand name on Social Networks and get instant alerts of brand mentions. It monitors popular sources like Twitter, Reddit, Product Hunt, Hacker News, Youtube etc., and if there is any mention of your brand keywords, it will alert you. The best part is that it sends alerts via Slack and Hipchat, so you will immediately get alerts via the chat tools that you already use.
Notify is pretty good at what it does. It lets you specify multiple keywords related to your brand that you want to monitor. In addition to that, it also lets you specify keywords that you want to excluded. And you can also monitor multiple variations of the keywords.
Most of the other services which provide such type of brand monitoring are paid, and are quite expensive. Surprisingly, Notify does all that for free, and kinda does a better job than a lot of other similar services out there.
How to Monitor Brand Mentions:
Using Notify is as easy as it gets. You start by creating a free account. After that, you specify the keywords that you want to monitor. As I mentioned, you can mention multiple keywords. There is no limit on number of keywords that can be monitored. Only limitation is that you can get upto 50,000 alerts per month in the free plan (50,000 is a LOT, I don’t even know how would someone go through so many alerts).
Once you have setup the keywords, you can integrate Notify with your Slack account or Hipchat account, so that you can get notification on them. The integration is pretty simple.
Once all that is done, you can just sit back, and start getting alerts about your brand mentions.
Let’s do a deeper dive.
Specify Brand Keywords to Monitor:
As I mentioned above, the first step is to specify the keywords that you want to monitor. For that, go to “Keywords” section of Notify. In this, you can specify keywords that you want to monitor. After specifying a keyword, just click on “Add” to add it to the list of brand keywords being monitored.
Now, it might be possible that you want to monitor a phrase which has multiple words, but it might not be necessary that the words are together. For example, you might want to monitor any occurrence of Apple and USB together. In that case, you can add a plus sign between the words: “Apple + USB”. In this case, whenever a text has both these words anywhere (and not necessarily together), Notify would send you alerts for those too.
Specify Keywords You Want to Exclude:
Any such service definitely needs to have a provision for keywords to exclude. For example, you might want to get notified about Apple, but if the text has “fruit” as well, then you might want to exclude that. In that case, just specify “fruit” as the keyword to exclude.
Notify actually gives you flexibility here too. Let’s say you want to monitor Apple and exclude both “fruit” and “pie”. In that case, you can specify multiple words in the Exclude Box, and separate them with a comma.
Specify Sources to Monitor for Brand Mentions:
Once you have specified the keywords, proceed to “Sources” tab to specify the Sources that you want to monitor for mentions of your brand. Notify has two types of sources: Free and Paid.
- Free sources include Twitter, Product Hunt, Tumblr, Hacker News, and Reddit.
- Paid Sources include Google+, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Medium etc.
At the time of writing of this review, the Paid sources were also free!
We will focus on free sources for the purpose of this review.
Notify not only lets you specify the sources you want to monitor, it also lets you customize those sources. For example, you can choose Twitter as a source to monitor for Brand keywords. However, it would make sense to exclude your own Twitter handle. That is what Notify lets you do. You can choose to exclude Specific Twitter handles, Exclude Retweets, and Exclude Tweets with Links.
Get Brand Mention Alerts on Slack and Hipchat:
This is the part of Notify that excites me most. Instead of sending you email alerts, Notify directly integrates with your Slack and Hipchat.
The integration is very easy and you just need to follow the steps mentioned on the website. Once done, Notify will start sending you instant alerts of as soon as it finds a mention of your keywords on any of the selected sources.
My Opinion of Notify:
We have covered various such services in the past, but either they end up becoming paid, or get acquired (and become paid), or just shut down. Notify seems to be doing it right, with a combination of free and paid sources. Also, it does a way better job at monitoring keywords as well as specifying keywords to exclude. And nothing beats the convenience of getting brand mention alerts on Slack.
I am going to be a long term user of Notify, and really hope Notify can stay in this game for long.
