In 2025, Americans reported losing $2.1 billion to scams that started on social media, eight times the total recorded in 2020, according to the FTC's latest Data Spotlight. Almost 30% of reported scam losses last year began on a social platform, more than any other contact method.
Those figures describe consumer harm. The same exposure reaches brands directly. In November 2022, a fake, verified Eli Lilly account posted that insulin was now free. The next day, Lilly's share price fell from $368 to $346, wiping out an estimated $15 billion in market value. Nobody at Lilly wrote that post. The company still had to manage the fallout.
That gap, between what a brand controls and what appears under its name online, is exactly what brand monitoring exists to close.
Why does brand monitoring matter now?
Brands now operate across more digital channels than a social team can watch unaided. A brand's public footprint stretches across social platforms, domains, marketplaces, apps and, for some risk teams, the deep and dark web. Each is a place where a name, logo or executive identity can be misused before anyone at the company notices.
Digital visibility across a growing attack surface. Official social accounts are only one part of where a brand appears; monitoring needs to reach domains, marketplaces and apps too.
Early detection of risks and misuse. Catching impersonation or brand-asset misuse early gives a team time to respond before it escalates, as the Eli Lilly case shows.
Reputation, security and compliance. The signals behind brand reputation monitoring also feed brand compliance monitoring, legal and security workflows.
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring, sometimes called online brand monitoring, is the continuous process of tracking how, and where, a brand appears online. That includes mentions of a company, its products, its executives and its brand assets, across social platforms, the wider web, marketplaces and apps.
For enterprises, it is no longer a marketing-only activity. The same signals that tell a marketing team what customers think also tell a security team where impersonation or misuse is happening, which is why brand monitoring increasingly sits alongside compliance and risk management.
It's also broader than social monitoring, which typically covers conversation and sentiment on social platforms alone. Brand monitoring includes that, but extends to domains, marketplaces, apps and other channels too.
What does brand monitoring include?
In practice, brand monitoring spans three broad areas:
Mentions and sentiment. Conversations, reviews and public commentary about the brand, tracked to understand how it's discussed and perceived.
Brand assets and identity. Names, logos, trademarks, hashtags and executive identities, wherever they appear online.
Suspicious accounts, domains and listings. Fake social profiles, fraudulent websites, unauthorised app listings and marketplace abuse that trade on a brand's identity.
How does brand monitoring work?
The underlying process holds across channels:
Define what needs monitoring — company names, products, executives, logos, trademarks, domains and campaigns.
Track channels continuously — social media, news, forums, domains, marketplaces and apps, on an ongoing basis rather than in periodic sweeps.
Surface and assess risks — flag suspicious activity and prioritise it by severity and likely impact.
Support escalation and response — feed findings into legal review, brand protection or takedown workflows, rather than leaving them as a log of mentions.
Brand monitoring vs brand protection
Brand monitoring and brand protection do different jobs. Monitoring provides visibility: it identifies mentions, misuse and suspicious activity. Protection adds the response — enforcement, takedown routes and remediation once something has been found.
Monitoring on its own suits awareness, reputation tracking and early signal detection, where the goal is understanding what's out there. It isn't designed to act on what it finds.
Where impersonation, fraud or high-risk exposure is involved, as in the Eli Lilly case, monitoring needs to connect to a fuller protection strategy, sometimes described as brand protection monitoring, with evidence, escalation and a clearer route to remediation through the relevant platform process.
Where Handles fits
Handles treats brand monitoring as a foundational capability, not the end state. The focus is on turning visibility into practical detection, prioritisation and response across social and digital channels, so findings lead somewhere rather than sitting in a report.
A few practices support this, whatever brand monitoring tools a team uses: define the assets that matter, monitor the channels most relevant to the brand's exposure, align marketing and security on ownership of what's found, and connect monitoring output to a response workflow reviewed on a regular cadence.
The category is moving the same way. As the attack surface widens across platforms and marketplaces, brand monitoring is drawing closer to enterprise security and digital risk protection, with more teams turning to AI brand monitoring to keep pace with signal volume.
Conclusion
Brand monitoring is a useful starting point for understanding how a brand appears online. On its own, though, visibility doesn't reduce risk, it identifies it. For most enterprises, monitoring needs to connect to a wider protection strategy: evidence, escalation and remediation, not just a feed of mentions.
Handles answer to that visibility question is a control layer: a single source of truth for official accounts, handle ownership, impersonation risk and platform remediation, so the governance work that follows monitoring has somewhere to go.
FAQs
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the continuous tracking of how and where a brand, its products and its executives appear online, across social media, the web, marketplaces and apps.
What does brand monitoring include?
It typically covers brand mentions and sentiment, brand assets and identity such as names, logos and trademarks, and suspicious accounts, domains or listings that misuse a brand's identity.
Why is brand monitoring important?
It gives visibility into a growing digital risk surface, helps catch impersonation and misuse early, and supports reputation, security and compliance work, not just marketing.
How does brand monitoring work?
Teams define what needs monitoring, track the relevant channels continuously, assess and prioritise what surfaces, then escalate into legal, protection or takedown workflows.
Is brand monitoring the same as brand protection?
No. Monitoring provides visibility into mentions and misuse; protection adds enforcement, takedown routes and remediation once an issue is found.
