Marketing & Growth

How to monitor brand mentions across social as Small Marketing Teams

Marketing & GrowthFor Small Marketing Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your three-person team is the brand's ears, eyes, and rapid-response unit all at once. When someone drops your company's name on X or LinkedIn, you find out either because a sales rep Slacks you 'did you see this?' or because you happened to be doomscrolling. There's no systematic tracking. You paste X searches into a spreadsheet once a week if you remember, check LinkedIn notifications manually, and have no idea whether that podcast mention last Tuesday moved signups at all. Meanwhile you're supposed to be writing campaign briefs in Notion and rebuilding the pipeline-contribution report in HubSpot. Brand mention monitoring falls to 'we'll do it when something blows up.'

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Small Marketing Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A daily automated log of every X mention of your brand or handle, captured via browser automation and stored in Starch so you can actually search and trend it over time

A weekly Growth Analyst digest that surfaces which traffic sources and referral spikes correlate with mention activity — so you can connect a mention spike to a signup bump without manual cross-referencing

A lightweight custom alert automation that Slacks your team when mention volume jumps, so no one finds out about a viral moment three days late

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 uses browser automation — Starch navigates X through your browser, no X API required. Growth Analyst connects directly to PostHog (Starch syncs your PostHog data on a schedule) and Gmail for digest delivery. The Slack alert automation connects Slack from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the spike condition triggers.

Prompts to copy

Track daily mentions of '@YourBrand' and 'YourBrand' on X. Log each mention with author handle, follower count, post text, post URL, and timestamp. Flag any mention with more than 500 likes or 100 reposts.

Every Monday at 8 AM, send me a digest that covers: (1) how many X mentions we got this week vs last week, (2) whether any mention spikes line up with signup or traffic spikes from PostHog, (3) the top three pieces of content driving referral traffic this week, and (4) one specific thing I should do differently this week based on the data.

If our X mention count on any single day is more than 2x our trailing 7-day daily average, send a Slack message to #marketing with a summary of the spike — how many mentions, the top posts by engagement, and a link to the full log in Starch.

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 runs via browser automation, so there's no API key to set up — Starch authenticates through your browser session and scrapes mentions daily.

2 Configure which search terms to track: your brand handle, your brand name without the @, common misspellings, and any product names that come up in conversation. Add competitor names if you want a comparison baseline.

3 Set the flagging threshold for high-engagement posts — start with 200 likes or 50 reposts so you're not getting alerted on noise, and adjust after the first week.

4 Install the Growth Analyst app and connect your PostHog account. Starch syncs your PostHog traffic and conversion data on a schedule so the weekly digest has fresh numbers every Monday.

5 Tell Starch to link the two data sources: 'Each week, check whether days with above-average X mention volume correlate with above-average PostHog signup volume. Surface the three strongest correlations in the digest.'

6 Wire in Slack from Starch's integration catalog for the spike alert automation. Describe the trigger condition and the message format — Starch builds the automation, not you.

7 Set the Growth Analyst digest to also pull LinkedIn mention data. LinkedIn enrichment is available through browser automation — describe it: 'Check LinkedIn notifications and my company page mentions daily and include a mention count in the weekly digest.'

8 Add a custom section to the Growth Analyst prompt that maps referral traffic spikes back to specific content or press hits: 'If PostHog shows a spike in referral traffic from a domain we haven't seen before, name the domain and the date in the digest.'

9 After two weeks of data, ask Starch to build a simple trend dashboard: 'Show me a weekly time series of X mention volume, PostHog signups, and referral traffic on the same chart, going back 90 days.'

10 Share the Starch app with your CEO or head of sales so they can see brand mention trends without asking you — give them read access and point them at the dashboard rather than fielding weekly 'how are we doing on social?' questions.

11 Once you have a month of data, refine the alert threshold and add a 'respond by end of day' tag for mentions from accounts with more than 5,000 followers so nothing falls through the cracks during a busy campaign week.

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

February 2026 Product Hunt launch week

Sample numbers from a real run

X mention volume, Feb 10 (launch day)	147
X mention volume, 7-day pre-launch average	12
PostHog signups, Feb 10	340
PostHog signups, 7-day pre-launch average	41
Referral traffic spike from producthunt.com (new domain flagged)	2,800
High-engagement mentions flagged for response (200+ likes)	9

Your team launched on Product Hunt on a Tuesday. Without Starch, you'd have known the launch was going well because the CEO Slacked '#2 product of the day!' — but you'd have had no structured record of who mentioned you, which posts drove signups, or whether the conversation spilled over to X organically. With the X Mentions Tracker running, Starch logged 147 mentions on launch day against a 12-mention daily average and fired the Slack spike alert at 9:42 AM. The Growth Analyst digest that Monday surfaced the correlation: days with 50+ mentions averaged 8.3x normal signup volume. It also flagged producthunt.com as a new referral domain driving 2,800 sessions — something you'd have caught eventually in GA4 but only after manually digging. Nine posts hit the 200-like threshold; your team used that list to respond personally within the same day, converting three of those conversations into inbound demo requests. The CEO got the weekly digest forwarded to her inbox instead of a manually assembled slide deck.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Daily X mention volume vs. 7-day trailing average (spike detection)

Mention-to-signup correlation coefficient over rolling 30 days

High-engagement mention response rate (% of flagged posts responded to within 24 hours)

Referral traffic from net-new domains per week (new press or community traction)

Weekly digest open rate and CEO/sales team engagement with shared dashboard

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Mention.com or Brand24

Purpose-built monitoring tools with cleaner UI, but they don't connect mention data to your PostHog signups or HubSpot pipeline — you're still manually triangulating whether a mention spike actually moved the business.

Manual X search + spreadsheet

Free and requires no setup, but it's asynchronous, incomplete, and the first thing that gets skipped during a busy campaign week — you'll miss the spikes that matter most.

Hootsuite or Sprout Social

Strong listening tools, but priced for social-first teams and require a dedicated tool subscription; still don't pipe mention data into your growth analytics without manual export.

Talkwalker or Brandwatch

Enterprise-grade coverage and sentiment scoring, but at a price point and implementation overhead that a 3-person team at a 120-person company can't justify — and they still don't close the loop to your conversion data.

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 Starch need X API access to track mentions?

No. The X Mentions Tracker uses browser automation — Starch navigates X the same way you would, without requiring API credentials. This matters because X's API has become expensive and restrictive; Starch sidesteps that entirely.

Can the Growth Analyst connect my GA4 data, not just PostHog?

The pre-built Growth Analyst app connects to PostHog today. If you use GA4, you can connect Google Analytics 4 from Starch's integration catalog and describe a custom growth digest that pulls from it — the agent queries it live when the automation runs. You won't have the same pre-built template, but describing what you want gets you there quickly.

What about LinkedIn mentions — can Starch track those too?

Yes, via browser automation. LinkedIn doesn't expose a public mentions API, but Starch can navigate your LinkedIn Company Page notifications and connection activity through your browser. Describe what you want tracked and at what frequency, and Starch builds the automation.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have to clear tools with IT.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your IT or legal team requires that certification, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap but not something we'll claim is done when it isn't.

Will this actually archive mention history, or is it just a live feed?

The X Mentions Tracker logs mentions into Starch's database on a daily schedule, so you build up a searchable historical record over time. That said, Starch is not a long-horizon data warehouse — if you need years of archived social listening data with sentiment scoring, a dedicated tool like Brandwatch is better suited. For a growing historical log that connects to your growth analytics, Starch works well.

How do I get the Slack alert to only fire on real spikes, not noise?

When you describe the alert automation, specify the spike condition in plain language — for example, 'only trigger if today's mention count is more than 2x the 7-day daily average AND total mentions are at least 20.' You can refine the threshold after the first two weeks once you know what normal looks like for your brand.