Surface the mentions worth answering

Monitoring brand mentions is easy to set up and easy to make useless. Every tool will happily deliver forty notifications a day, most of them from bots, job boards, and people using your name as a common noun.

The value is not in seeing mentions. It is in seeing the two per week that should get a reply.

Say what you are looking for, not just the word

Every weekday at 9am, look for public mentions of us from the last 24
hours.

Bring me only:
  someone asking a question about us that nobody has answered
  someone unhappy, whether or not they tagged us
  someone recommending us, so we can thank them
  a comparison against a competitor

Ignore job posts, press aggregation, bots, and anyone using our name to
mean something else.

For each: what they said, who they are in one line, why it is worth
answering, and a link.

If there is nothing worth answering, say so and stop. Most days there will
not be.

"Most days there will not be" is calibration, not modesty. Told to monitor mentions, a tool will find some, because finding nothing feels like failure. Saying out loud that an empty day is the expected case is what stops the report padding itself with things you would never have replied to.

Answer the unhappy one first

The ranking here is not by reach. An unanswered question from a small account is worth more of your attention than a large account saying something nice, because one of them is a decision in progress.

Draft, and read it before it goes

Public replies are a different risk from email. Have it draft, never post.

Draft a reply to this mention. Short, in our voice, no marketing language,
no "sorry you feel that way".

If they are wrong about a fact, correct it plainly once. Do not argue, and
do not reply at all if the best available response is defensive.

That last clause is worth keeping. Some mentions are best left alone, and an employee that always produces a reply will produce one for those too.

Watch what it filters out

Once a week, skim the ignored pile. The filter is where this playbook fails silently, and the only way to know it is too aggressive is to look at what it threw away.

What good looks like

Two or three mentions a week reach you, each with a reason attached, and you reply to the ones that matter within hours rather than finding them a month later.

If you are getting ten a day, the filter is too loose. If you find good ones in the ignored pile, it is too tight.