Marketing & Growth

How to monitor brand mentions across social as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You find out about a bad review the same way your regulars do — by stumbling across it. A guest posts on X that the service was slow on a Saturday night, tags your handle, and fourteen people see it before you do. Your Yelp and Google alerts are set up but inconsistent. You're not monitoring X at all. You have no idea if a food blogger mentioned your bar in a thread, or if a local influencer tagged your hotel's brunch and drove a spike in reservations. You're running three separate apps and none of them tell you what people are saying about you today — only after the damage is done.

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Marketing & GrowthFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up
Outcome

What you'll set up

A daily X mention tracker that logs every mention of your restaurant, bar, or hotel handle automatically — no manual searching required
A weekly brand digest that surfaces trending complaints, positive shoutouts, and influencer mentions in one summary you can read before service
An alert system so a spike in negative mentions on a Friday night doesn't catch you off guard when you're already on the floor
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 connects to X (Twitter) through browser automation — no API required. Starch runs an independent browser session daily to search your handle and brand name, then logs results to a table inside Starch. Growth Analyst reads that mentions log and your Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule) to compile and email the weekly digest. No third-party review aggregator required.

Prompts to copy
Track daily mentions of @TavernoBravo and 'Taverño Bravo' on X. Log every mention — the username, the text, the timestamp, and whether it's a reply, repost, or original post. Flag any mention that includes words like 'slow', 'cold', 'rude', 'wrong order', 'never again', or 'loved it', 'amazing', 'best', 'came back'. Save everything to a table I can review each morning.
Every Monday at 7am, email me a brand summary for the past week. Pull from the X mentions log. Tell me: total mentions, how sentiment broke down (positive / negative / neutral), the top three complaints that came up more than once, any account with more than 500 followers who mentioned us, and one suggested response or action for the most urgent negative thread.
Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent
Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Install the X Mentions Tracker from the Starch App Store — it's a pre-built starter that uses browser automation to search X daily for your handle and brand keywords, no X developer account or API key needed.
2 Tell Starch which names to track: your @handle, your restaurant's full name, any common misspellings or nicknames (e.g., 'Taverño', 'Tavernobr', the shorthand your regulars use on neighborhood Facebook groups).
3 Add sentiment keywords specific to a restaurant or bar — flag 'wrong order', 'hair in food', 'overpriced', 'reservation ignored' as negative signals; flag 'best happy hour', 'came back twice', 'birthday dinner was perfect' as positive.
4 Set the tracker to run nightly at 11pm so you have yesterday's mentions waiting in a table when you arrive in the morning — before you're on the floor dealing with prep and delivery.
5 Install or describe a custom Growth Analyst app and tell Starch to pull from your mentions log table — prompt it to write a weekly digest in plain English, not a data dump.
6 Add a follower-size filter: if any account mentioning you has more than 500 followers (a local food writer, a neighborhood influencer, a critic), flag that row separately so it surfaces first in your digest.
7 Set Starch to send the weekly digest to your Gmail every Monday before 8am — Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule and can write to it as well, so the digest arrives in your inbox like a message from a marketing assistant who actually read everything.
8 Add a surge alert: if more than five negative mentions appear in a single day, Starch sends an immediate email or Slack message — because finding out at Monday's digest that Saturday night was a disaster is too late.
9 Review the first two weeks of logged mentions and refine your keyword list — restaurant-specific language shifts (guests say 'the vibe was off', not 'service quality declined') and your tracker should match how real guests actually talk.
10 Each week, use the digest's 'suggested action' field as your starting point: if three people mentioned the same dish was disappointing, that goes to your chef before the weekend, not into a folder you'll look at in a month.
11 As your data accumulates, ask Starch to compare this month's mention volume and sentiment against last month — useful context for understanding whether a menu change or a press feature actually moved how people talk about you online.

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Worked example

Week of March 10–16, 2026 — Post-Valentine's spike at a 60-seat neighborhood restaurant

Sample numbers from a real run
Total X mentions (7 days)47
Positive mentions31
Negative mentions9
Neutral / informational7
Accounts with 500+ followers3
Recurring complaint keyword: 'wait time'6

Valentine's week drove a 3x spike in X mentions for Taverño Bravo — 47 total versus the usual 15 or so. The Monday digest flagged that 6 of 9 negative posts mentioned wait time, and two of them came from accounts with over 1,000 followers — a local food blogger and a neighborhood newsletter editor. Without the tracker, neither of those would have surfaced until someone forwarded a screenshot days later. The Growth Analyst digest suggested the owner respond publicly to the blogger's post (which had 43 reposts) and reach out directly to the newsletter editor offering a return visit. It also flagged that 12 positive posts mentioned a specific cocktail by name, which became the bar team's next Instagram post. The owner spent 20 minutes on Monday morning acting on all of it instead of finding out about the problem on Thursday.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Weekly mention volume by sentiment (positive / negative / neutral) — tells you whether a menu change or an event shifted how people talk about you
Negative mention recurrence rate — same complaint appearing in 3+ posts in a week signals an operational problem, not a one-off
High-reach mention count — how many posts about you came from accounts with meaningful audiences (food writers, local influencers, neighborhood aggregators)
Response rate and time — if you're responding to negative X posts, tracking how fast you do it matters for local perception
Mention spike days — correlate mention volume against your cover count and reservation data to understand which service periods drive online noise
Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Alerts for brand name
Catches web and news mentions but has no visibility into X posts, especially recent ones that haven't been indexed — misses the real-time restaurant conversation entirely.
Mention.com or Brand24
Dedicated tools that do social listening well, but add another monthly subscription and another dashboard you have to remember to check — Starch puts the digest in your inbox and connects to the rest of your operation so you don't need a separate login.
Manual X search on your phone
Free and immediate but inconsistent — you search when you remember, miss posts that don't tag your handle directly, and have no record to look back at week over week.
Yelp and Google review email alerts
These cover review platforms but leave X, food blogs, and influencer posts completely unmonitored — the places where restaurant reputation actually gets built or burned fastest.
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.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does this require an X developer account or API access?
No. Starch automates X through your browser — the same way a person would search and scroll through posts — so there's no API key, no developer application, and no X Premium subscription required. If X is reachable in a browser, Starch can read it.
Will it catch mentions that don't tag my handle — like someone who just writes 'Taverño Bravo' in a post?
Yes. You tell Starch which keywords and name variants to search, and the tracker runs those searches daily, not just handle lookups. Add misspellings, the shorthand your regulars use, your neighborhood's nickname for you — Starch searches all of them.
What if X changes its site layout and the browser automation breaks?
Browser automation can be affected by site changes — this is an honest tradeoff versus an official API. Starch monitors for failures and will alert you if a daily run doesn't complete. You're not relying on a silent failure; you'll know when something needs attention.
Can it also track Yelp and Google reviews, not just X?
Yelp and Google review pages are browser-reachable, so Starch can automate them the same way — no official API needed. Describe what you want: 'Check my Yelp page daily and log any new reviews with their star rating and text.' Starch builds that as a separate automation you can run alongside the X tracker.
I'm not a data person. Will I actually understand the weekly digest?
The digest is written in plain English — complaint counts, positive shoutouts, specific posts to respond to, one action suggestion. You can tell Starch exactly what format works for you: 'Write it like a text from my GM, not a marketing report.' The prompt is the product.
Is my data stored securely? Is Starch SOC 2 certified?
Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified — worth knowing if your group has a compliance requirement. For most independent restaurant and hotel operators, this isn't a blocker, but it's honest to say upfront rather than bury it.
How far back does the X mention history go on day one?
The tracker starts logging from the day you set it up — it doesn't pull years of historical X data. Within a few weeks you'll have a baseline for normal mention volume, and within a month you can start comparing week over week. Starch is a live data surface, not an archive.

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