Marketing & Growth

How to monitor brand mentions across social as Solo Media and Creator Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor Solo Media and Creator Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You find out someone mentioned your podcast on X because a listener DMed you about it three days later. You're not running a social listening tool — that's a $300/month enterprise subscription you can't justify for a two-person operation. So you manually search your show name and handle maybe twice a week, miss half of it anyway, and lose the window to reply, repost, or turn a warm mention into a sponsor conversation. Meanwhile your newsletter name, your host's name, and your episode titles are all getting mentioned in threads you'll never see. The brand awareness you've worked 18 months to build is happening in public and you're not in the room.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Solo Media and Creator Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A daily X Mentions Tracker that logs every mention of your show name, handle, and episode titles — automatically, through browser automation, no X API or enterprise tool required

A Slack or email digest that surfaces new mentions each morning, sorted by engagement, so you can reply to the ones worth replying to in under 10 minutes

A running log of mentions tied to publish dates, so you can see which episodes actually generate conversation and use that to pitch sponsors

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

X Mentions Tracker Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

X Mentions Tracker runs through Starch's browser automation — no X API or third-party social listening subscription needed. Starch automates X through your browser daily, scraping mentions and logging them. Growth Analyst connects to PostHog from Starch's integration catalog, querying it live to correlate spikes in newsletter signups or site traffic with mention volume. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to post your morning digest. Gmail can be used instead — Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule if you prefer email delivery.

Prompts to copy

Track daily mentions of '@yourshowhandle', 'Your Show Name', and 'your episode title' on X. Log each mention with the author, follower count, engagement (likes + reposts), and post date. Send me a morning Slack message with any mentions from the last 24 hours, sorted by engagement descending.

Every Monday morning, email me a weekly summary of my X mention volume vs the prior week, which episodes are still generating conversation, and whether any mentions came from accounts with 5k+ followers that I should follow up with.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Install the X Mentions Tracker app from the Starch App Store — it's pre-built for exactly this and runs via browser automation, so there's no X API key to configure or enterprise plan to buy.

2 Tell Starch which search terms to track: your show handle (e.g., @founderpodcast), your newsletter name in plain text, your own name if you're a solo host, and 2-3 recurring episode keywords that listeners use when they clip or quote you.

3 Set the automation to run daily at 7am. Starch automates X through your browser each morning, finds every public post matching your tracked terms from the last 24 hours, and logs them — author, follower count, likes, reposts, link to the post.

4 Wire the output to Slack (connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog) or Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule) so the digest lands where you already start your day — not in another dashboard you'll forget to open.

5 Add a filter prompt: 'Flag any mention from an account with more than 3,000 followers or more than 20 reposts and put it at the top of the digest.' These are the ones worth a reply within the hour.

6 Build a lightweight running log: tell Starch to append each day's mentions to a Google Sheet (connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when writing). You now have a searchable archive of every public mention, week by week.

7 Tag mentions by episode. Tell Starch: 'If the mention text includes the episode title or number, add an episode column so I can filter by episode.' After a month you'll know which episode concepts actually travel on social.

8 Connect Growth Analyst to PostHog to cross-reference mention spikes with traffic. When a thread goes wider than usual, you'll see whether it moved your signup numbers — which is exactly the data a sponsor wants to see when you're pitching a mid-roll.

9 Once a month, tell Starch to pull the top 10 mentions by follower count from the Google Sheet and draft a short 'social proof' summary you can paste into your sponsor media kit: 'Our content was mentioned by accounts including X, Y, Z this month — combined reach of N followers.'

10 Set a secondary automation: 'If any mention includes the words sponsor, ad, or partnership in the same thread as my show name, flag it separately.' Listeners sometimes tweet about sponsor experiences unprompted — you want to see those fast.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Week of March 10, 2026 — Episode 87 drops, thread blows up

Sample numbers from a real run

Mentions logged Mon–Sun	47
Mentions from accounts with 3k+ followers	6
Highest-engagement mention (likes + reposts)	214
New newsletter signups that week (PostHog)	312
Baseline weekly signups (prior 4-week avg)	89

Episode 87 went out Tuesday morning. By Wednesday your Starch morning digest flagged 14 mentions from the prior 24 hours, including one from a creator with 41,000 followers who quote-tweeted your episode clip. You replied within the hour — that account then pinned your reply, which added another 180 followers to your newsletter by Friday. The Google Sheet log showed 47 total mentions that week vs. your usual 11–14. When you pulled Growth Analyst's Monday summary, it showed 312 new signups that week against your 89-per-week baseline — a 250% spike. You screenshot both numbers, dropped them into your sponsor deck, and sent it to two brands you'd been warming. One replied within a day. None of this required you to manually search X once. The whole monitoring chain — scrape, log, digest, flag — ran while you were editing Episode 88.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Weekly mention volume by show name and episode title (logged automatically)

Mention-to-signup conversion rate: did a mention spike move your newsletter signups that week (via PostHog in Growth Analyst)

High-reach mention rate: what percentage of mentions came from accounts with 3k+ followers — the number sponsors actually care about

Reply-within-1-hour rate on flagged high-engagement mentions — because timing matters on X

Episode-level mention ranking: which episodes keep generating conversation 2–4 weeks after publish, useful for knowing what topic territory to return to

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Brand24 or Mention.com

Both do social listening well, but start at $79–$149/month for plans that include X — a real line item when you're also paying for Riverside, Beehiiv, and Descript. Starch covers this as part of your broader ops stack, not as a standalone subscription.

TweetDeck / X's native search

Free and fast for real-time browsing, but you have to go look — there's no logging, no digest, no archive, and no way to correlate mentions with your signup data or episode performance.

Zapier + X API

X's free API tier severely limits search volume and requires developer setup; the paid API tier that handles keyword search costs $100/month on its own, before Zapier fees. Starch automates X through your browser instead — no API account required.

Manually searching X 2x per week

What most solo creators actually do. Takes 20 minutes per session, misses most of it, produces no log, and guarantees you reply to high-value mentions 48–72 hours too late.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — x mentions tracker, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does this require an X developer account or X API access?

No. Starch automates X through your browser — the same way you'd manually search it, just automated and logged. You don't need an X API key, a developer account, or a premium X subscription.

What if my show name is a common phrase — will I get flooded with false positives?

You can tune the search terms and add exclusion filters in your prompt. Tell Starch: 'Track mentions of "Founder Weekly" but exclude posts that also include the word football' — or whatever phrase keeps polluting your results. You can refine this after the first few daily digests.

Can I track mentions across platforms other than X — like Reddit or LinkedIn?

Yes. Reddit and LinkedIn are both web-reachable, so Starch can automate both through your browser — no API needed for either. Tell Starch which subreddits to check or which LinkedIn search queries to run. Each platform would be a separate automation, but they can all feed into the same Google Sheet log.

Will this work if my show is mentioned in a thread, not just a direct post mentioning my handle?

Browser automation searches X the same way you would when you type a keyword into the search bar — so it picks up mentions of your show name in text even when your handle isn't @-tagged. This is actually the main gap with handle-only monitoring: most listeners don't tag you, they just name the show.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm nervous about giving it access to my accounts.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's on the roadmap. For the X Mentions Tracker specifically, Starch is reading public posts through browser automation, not accessing your X account credentials. Worth knowing before you decide.

How does this connect to my newsletter growth data?

Growth Analyst connects to PostHog (from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live) and emails you a weekly summary that includes signup trends and top referrers. If you set both apps up, you can manually correlate the mention-volume spike weeks with your signup data — or tell Starch to build a custom dashboard that puts both on one screen.