Brand Pulse: News & Social Monitor

Know what the media and social users are saying about your brand and competitors, and get alerted the moment a story turns negative.

Brand Pulse tracks your brand in Google News across country editions (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Egypt, Francophone Africa, US, UK, India…), Bing News, any RSS feed and your TikTok or other social datasets. Media monitoring tools usually cost hundreds of dollars a month; this costs cents per day.

What you get

• Every mention: outlet, headline, snippet, link, date, the entities it names (your brand and competitors), and whether it is new since the last run.
• Sentiment about you, not about the article. Sentences that name you are scored separately, so "Airtel grows while Safaricom faces backlash" counts as negative for Safaricom and positive for Airtel. Articles with direct links are opened and the paragraphs that mention you are analysed.
• Risk flags: legal & regulatory, security & fraud, outages & operations, financial, and reputation.
• Topics: launches, financial results, leadership, partnerships, regulation, customer experience, CSR, technology, expansion.
• Stories: the same news covered by many outlets is grouped into one story, with outlet count, major-outlet count, sentiment and impact score.
• Share of voice vs competitors, net sentiment, negative %, risk mentions, top outlets, top topics and mentions per day.
• Spike detection: last-24-hour volume vs your normal daily volume (history kept per monitor), plus negativity spikes.
• Alerts to Slack, Discord, Teams (via workflows) or any webhook. They cover volume spikes, negative spikes, new risk stories on major or multiple outlets, and viral negative social posts.
• Optional AI briefing with your own key: an executive summary, key stories, risks with recommended actions, a competitor watch and a holding statement when a risk is high.
• HTML report ready to forward to your comms team.

TikTok and other social data

Run the TikTok Sentiment & Trend Intelligence Actor (or any X, Reddit, YouTube or Instagram scraper) and pass its dataset ID in Social datasets. Brand Pulse detects text, dates, engagement and existing sentiment labels automatically. Social mentions then appear alongside news in share of voice, alerts and the report. Chain both Actors with an Apify integration ("run Brand Pulse when the TikTok run succeeds") for a fully automatic pipeline.

Example input

{
  "brandName": "Safaricom",
  "brandAliases": ["M-Pesa", "SCOM"],
  "excludeTerms": ["Safaricom Stadium"],
  "competitors": ["Airtel|Airtel Money", "Telkom Kenya|Telkom"],
  "editions": ["KE", "UG", "TZ"],
  "includeAfricaFeeds": true,
  "socialDatasetIds": ["<your TikTok dataset id>"],
  "lookbackDays": 7,
  "monitorName": "safaricom-daily",
  "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/…"
}

Schedule it hourly, daily or weekly with the same Monitor name. Spike baselines improve after a few runs, and each mention is charged only once.

Output

• Dataset: the Mentions view, plus a Negative & risk mentions view.
• REPORT (HTML) · STORIES · SHARE_OF_VOICE · OUTPUT (spikes, alerts, AI briefing, per-source stats, warnings).

Good to know

• Google News RSS links point to Google's redirect page and carry headlines only. Bing and publisher feeds give direct links and snippets, which allow article reading.
• Items that don't actually name a tracked entity are dropped (search engines return loose matches).
• Sentiment is lexicon-based (English plus common Swahili/Sheng), fast and explainable. Use the AI briefing for nuance.
• The built-in African feed list is best effort: a feed that moves or fails is skipped and reported in warnings.
• Social usernames are excluded unless you turn them on. Only public content is processed.

Pricing

$1.50 per 1,000 new mentions, plus $0.01 per AI briefing (optional). See PRICING.md.