What are Owned and Earned mentions?
Not every mention of your brand means someone else is talking about you. Some mentions come directly from your own website or social media profiles.
Brand24 automatically classifies mentions into two channel types:
Owned - mentions published on websites, domains, and social media profiles that belong to your brand.
Earned - mentions coming from external sources, such as articles, reviews, forums, influencer content, customer posts, and other conversations outside your own channels.
This makes it easier to separate your own communication from what other people are saying about your brand.
Why use the Channel type filter?
Separating Owned and Earned mentions can help you:
Measure organic conversations about your brand without your own posts affecting the results
Focus on external coverage, customer feedback, and UGC
Analyze the performance of your own communication separately
Track negative Earned mentions that may require your attention
Build reports focused specifically on Owned or Earned media
How does it work?
Brand24 automatically tries to identify the website and social media profiles that belong to your brand based on your project name and keywords.
The detected channels are added to your Owned channels list. You can review this list and add or remove channels manually.
Brand24 then compares your mentions with this list:
If a mention comes from one of your Owned channels, it is classified as Owned.
All other mentions are classified as Earned.
💡 We recommend reviewing your Owned channels. Automatic detection may not identify every channel, especially regional profiles, subdomains, marketplace stores, or other less obvious brand properties.
How to filter Owned and Earned mentions
Open your project and go to Mentions.
Open the filters.
Find the Channel type section.
Select Owned, Earned, or both.
You can combine Channel type with other filters.
For example, select Earned + Negative sentiment to focus on negative conversations happening outside your own channels. Or choose Owned + last 7 days to see only your brand's recent publications.
You can also save your filter and return to the same view later.
How to manage your Owned channels
You can access your Owned channels from the link in the tooltip next to the Channel type filter.
There, you can review the channels detected by Brand24 and manually add or remove domains and profiles, including:
Websites and domains
Instagram
Facebook
X/Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
TikTok
If your brand uses the same handle on multiple social platforms, each profile needs to be identified separately. For example, an Instagram profile and a TikTok profile with the same handle are treated as two different channels.
Adding a channel does not start monitoring it
Adding a website or profile to your Owned channels only tells Brand24 how to classify mentions that have already been collected.
It does not add a new source to your monitoring or make Brand24 start collecting mentions from that channel.
What happens to existing mentions?
Classification covers the default 30 days of data loaded into the project.
Older mentions may not receive an Owned label. In practice, they will appear under Earned when you use the Channel type filter.
Changes to your Owned channels may also require recent mentions to be classified again, which is done automatically and also cover last 30 days of data.
Why is the Channel type filter disabled?
You may temporarily see the Channel type filter grayed out.
This can happen when Brand24 is still:
Identifying your domains and social media profiles
Classifying existing mentions as Owned or Earned
During this process, you may see animated dots instead of mention counts. This prevents incomplete classification from showing misleading numbers.
The process usually takes a few minutes.
If Brand24 doesn't identify any Owned channels automatically, you will be asked to add them manually. You can access the channel list using the link in the tooltip next to the filter.
Why are all my mentions Earned?
If you've just enabled the feature, Brand24 may still be classifying your existing mentions. Wait 2–3 minutes and refresh the page.
If everything is still classified as Earned, check your Owned channels list and make sure the correct domains and profiles are there.
Can I use Owned and Earned mentions in reports?
Yes. You can combine the Channel type filter with a date range and other filters, save the configuration, and use the filtered data in your PDF or Excel exports.
For example, if you want a report focused only on conversations generated outside your own channels, select Earned before preparing your export.
Availability
Owned and Earned mention classification is available to in all plans. Your Brand24 account must be active.