Introducing online reputation management
Whether you are a business or an individual, your reputation makes a huge difference when it comes to the audience you reach or the offers you get. A well-placed negative or positive remark can definitely turn the tide.
Today, everything is online and we all know that what goes online, stays online for good. It makes sense for you to keep an eye on your online reputation on social media and other websites like news sites, blogs, review sites, and the like.
So, it’s really important for you to ensure that you monitor your online reputation regularly with the best reputation management software. Your company needs to keep an eye on your brand reputation to ensure that you aren’t constantly receiving terribly negative reviews and see what you can do to best deal with it.
Online reputation management basically helps your brand image by focusing on the positive things that people have to say about you and minimize the negative reviews. Think of it as PR that extends to your brand image online.
The issue of online reputation management is something that affects both companies and individuals. With more recruiters combing the internet for dirt on their potential employees, it makes sense for people to manage their online reputation on social media platforms and the like.
It’s time to understand that the social in social media includes not just your friends, but your coworkers and employers as well.
How do you do it?
Online reputation management seems simple on paper but is truly a Herculean task to carry out on a regular basis. The process involves three straightforward steps:
- Identify the hashtags that are commonly used when referring to your company – positive and negative
- Figure out the magnitude of the threat with which your company is dealing
- Formulate a strategy to respond and deal with any negative sentiments
Reputation management involves a lot more than a one-time appraisal of your situation. It has to be repeated on a regular basis.
Also read: A Comprehensive Guide to Branding Yourself on Social Media
If you find that people are consistently taking issue with certain aspects of your company, it may also be time to turn inwards and take a good hard look at how the company is functioning.
It’s relatively easy to monitor your online reputation when you use the right tools for it. In order to help you with this huge task, here are some of the best tools for free and paid online reputation management to keep your brand reputation sparkling clean.
In this article,
The best online reputation management tools
Social Animal
From digging deep into articles to identify the keywords for which you are looking, all the way to analyzing headlines and social media monitoring, Social Animal offers you a lot of useful insights when it comes to reputation management for your brand.
Just type in the keywords you want to keep an eye on and get regular updates on how your keywords are being used online. Place search filters based on domain, published date, shared date, and the author names for better-categorized reports.
To further cement your online reputation, figure out who your target audience and biggest influencers are and keep track of whether your brand name shows up in their content.
You can also identify what type of sentiment works best for your target audience so that any information, comments, or statements that go out can be tailored accordingly.
With competitor monitoring, you can also track similar keywords and positive and negative mentions across the Internet, including major social media platforms and new reviews.
Try checking your brand mentions now. Click here to try it for free!
Your search engine
Search engines can do so much more than just show website results these days. Whether you’re looking for addresses and phone numbers or reviews of different products, your search engine can and should be your first step to better online reputation management.
Make sure that your search is carried out in incognito mode so that the search engine shows you what is actually there and not what they think that you may want to see.
However, this step may involve some categorization from your end. Split the results into positive, negative, and neutral results. Another thing you must keep your eye out for is whether something else more famous or notorious shows up when you type in your keywords. Share your name with a famous serial killer? This may not work out in your favor when organizations are searching for your name.
One of the more famous tools offered by Google is Google Alerts. Set up an alert for your keywords or name and Google will alert you when a brand mention, either positive or negative, pops up via email. Google Alerts is a great way to keep track of brand mentions in one place in real-time.
Reputology
This is a review management software that helps you monitor, respond to and analyze online reviews for your products and services. It really helps businesses like restaurants and travel spots that derive most of the business through online reviews from review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and more.
It’s a tool for multi-location sites and collects all the information about reviews in one, easy-to-use dashboard while also giving you real-time email notifications on an everyday basis.
This media monitoring tool also provides an in-depth analysis that turns piles of customer feedback into well-categorized information that you can use for your benefit.
This tool also has customer-focused review management. It shows you how your company followed up on negative and positive reviews and responded while also providing customer sentiment analysis. This way, you can enhance customer experience by getting to the bottom of the issue. It also gives you a cool decision tree, that helps you figure out how best to respond to customer complaints in a manner that offers the best online reputation management possible.
Brand24
Brand24 is a media monitoring tool that helps you keep an eye on your online reputation.
All you have to do is create a project and use each project to track brand mentions and keywords on social networks and other online sites like news sites, review sites, and the like. This is one of the few online reputation management tools that provide automatic sentiment analysis, making it easier to categorize your mentions.
This reputation management software tracks online reviews, social media mentions to gauge customer feedback and get to know your audience better.
This is a management platform that gives you many ways to categorize and analyze your data. Use filters like time-frames while also identifying the biggest influencers in your industry.
Review Push
This useful reputation management software makes online review management easy by helps you collect reviews about your brand from all over the Internet in a single space.
Are you a business with multiple locations? Don’t worry, Review Push has you covered by monitoring reviews from multi-location businesses, with unlimited locations that you can add.
This tool provides review monitoring by sending you an email notification every time your business gets one. You can respond to them directly through the email sent, making things a whole lot easier.
This tool also helps manage the dissemination of information within your business. Multi-level dashboards help provide access at the corporate. regional, district, or store-level. Multi-level reporting also provides reports for different levels in your business.
Review Push makes it easy to keep track of your reviews while improving your online presence significantly.
BrandMentions
This reputation management software offers social media monitoring and also analyzes your brand’s reputation on the Internet by combing through blogs, review sites, news portals and more. This tool helps you stay up-to-date when it comes to the online presence of your business.
This is one of many tools that let you set up projects to track and monitor keywords of interest. This tool also displays a sentiment analysis for every brand mention that shows up online.
You can also figure out who is talking about you and what they are saying with real-time updates sent straight to your inbox.
Get a report that shows a detailed breakdown of your mentions so that you can use it to set up or tweak your marketing strategy.
YouScan
This is a social listening tool that monitors your social media and various other websites for mentions of your business. After this information is collected, this tool analyzes it to understand how it impacts your online presence.
All you have to do is set up searches to find what you’re looking for and a page pops up with all the mentions curated by keeping your criteria in mind.
It is one of the few tools that offer image recognition features. It monitors and scans more than 500 million social media posts every day, half of which are images.
Visual Insights lets you comb through all the images that show up, matching your criteria, with the help of an exceedingly accurate AI engine that powers image recognition.
Reputation.com
An online reputation management tool made primarily for larger businesses, Reputation.com provides a lot of interesting services that help you monitor and improve your online reputation with ease.
It helps you rank higher in searches and search directories so that your company gets the edge when a potential client looks for you. The tool also surveys customers and collects in-depth feedback, which can later be broken down into actionable insights.
This software also provides a feature called Reputation Live, which helps you generate review requests that are sent directly to customers through text messages and other similar formats. This makes it easier for customers to directly review your product or service immediately after use.
Your online reputation pulls a lot more weight today than it ever has before and it only makes sense to leverage it so that your business continues growing.
Online reputation management can be demanding but it does not have to be time-consuming. With the right tools on your side, you can easily build up and maintain an online brand presence that is positive and can easily attract potential customers.
