In a world of a digital age, monitoring online reputation can make a huge difference.
You would want to know what others say about your brand, and stay in the loop with current trends in the industry.
Reputation indicators offered by various monitoring tools can give you an opportunity to quickly react and reshape the reactions of unsatisfied customers. Furthermore, you can get insights and inputs about your marketing strategy or community support and consider what changes you need to make.
What else can you get from monitoring online reputation?
- You can discover the way your consumers/customers think and what they like or dislike.
Active internet users would rather express their dissatisfaction and experience publicly, commonly on the social platforms, than get in contact with a brand privately via email.
- You can react immediately in case of any negative comments, reviews, any sort of dissatisfaction or general complaints.
A timely response and immediate reaction can keep you from inconvenience or bad reputation.
In addition, discovering consumers’ previous experiences and comments, can help you create more successful marketing and social media campaigns, and more effectively promote your product and brand.
How can you track “the web whispers”?
The opportunity to discover what others are saying about your brand comes with many benefits, not just one.
You can track every mention, comment, linked word, shared link or video by using an efficient reputation monitoring tool. There are many tools that can easily track your brand’s reputation online, both on the web and social networks.
You can choose to use only one tool or a group of similar tools that work best for your niche.
Keep in mind that some tools are free while others require a certain budget. However, it all depends on what you want to monitor and what data you need.
Most monitoring tools will track the following:
- Search engine results
- Social media networks
- Google reviews
- Forums
- TripAdvisor
Below is the list of free and paid tools that you can use to discover what people say about your brand and things of interest for your business, and track current trends in the industry.
#1 Google Alerts is necessary for tracking mentions and trending content
- For anyone involved in digital marketing
If you are an experienced marketer you probably already use it, either to monitor your brand or to find interesting content.
If not, it’s quite simple. Once you enter your company name and other terms from your niche you want to get alerts for, choose when you want to be notified. You can choose to receive alerts as they happen, at least once a day, and at most once a week.
Alerts for mentions and published content will arrive as email notifications.
#2 Brand Mentions is a monitoring tool that helps you get data from 80 social media sites
- For any brand that uses social networks as its primary way of communication with consumers
From Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, this tool tracks any social network’s feature whenever your brand is mentioned.
BrandMentions gives useful data that can help you create more effective campaigns and improve your brand’s reputation.
The tool can measure the exact strength of your online reputation, in other words – the likelihood that your brand is discussed on social media.
It can measure the ratio of positive and negative mentions, and the number of users who write about you and mention your name.
#3 Talkwalker is great for creating future social media campaigns
- For any brand focused on social networks
Talkwalker offers great digital media monitoring features and social analytics. Powered by immense possibilities of artificial intelligence and data integration, the tool provides you with deeper insights, enabling you to make better strategic decisions and understand the conversations about you brand.
One of the interesting features is Quick Search that allows you to detect the trending stories in the industry, in real time.
Talkwalker is analyzing data by filtering mentions by market, product, campaign, and activation levels. In practice, this means that you can see and analyze which posts, tweets, and articles are driving social discussion about your brand.
With their intuitive interface and user-friendly reports you are equipped with data and statistics to make better operational and promotional strategy.
#4 Smart Moderation is an efficient tool for hiding unwanted comments
- For marketers, social media managers, and digital agencies
This is a comment moderation tool that allows you to automatically hide or delete comments that you do not want on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Smart Moderation can help in managing thousands of possible negative comments, curse words, inadequate responses, and credibility ticks especially if you run a campaign that drives attention. They also offer support for Hootsuite and HubSpot.
#5 SentiOne is for tracking mentions from thousands of web sources
- For new brands that want to build their reputation
This “social listening” tool can help you to pay more attention to what people say about your brand. The advantage of SentiOne is that you can use both real-time data and historical data of what people may have said about your brand in the past.
You can track mentions of your brand, social profiles, and the keywords you choose.
What is more interesting is that SentiOne tracks real-time conversations so you can engage with your customers.
For the best customer service and support you can surely take an advantage of their multi-channel AI automation.
#6 Review Push is effective for real-time reviews management
- For brands that own online stores on different levels
Review Push helps in managing reviews that come from multiple locations such as Facebook, Yelp, Google, Yellowpages, and Foursquare.
If you own an e-commerce business, you can use the tool to collect reviews and respond to them timely, see how your stores rank against each other, find out which local reviews you are missing across the web, improve your search rankings, track your growth and gain new customers and see how your competitors are ranking.
In case you own several online stores, the tool gives you good insights into your stores’ review performance, creating charts with data related to product or service improvements for each store. You can have great benefits from their multi-level reporting dashboard.
#7 Meltwater is great for media and social media management
- For global brands, large companies and enterprises
Meltwater was originally created to collect mentions from relevant news sources, however, it emerged as consolidated media intelligence suite fro PR and marketing. The tools monitor, manage and analyses social media, online news, radio, print and broadcast.
The tool allows you to effectively monitor global media and manage social media, as well as to get data via social media listening.
Furthermore, you will get great data and information from tools that analyse influencer engagement and PR.
The best part of this tool comes with features that allow you to track who’s talking about your competitors, how many mentions they’re getting daily, weekly, or monthly in comparison to yours.
#8 The Brand Grader is for tracking influencers and top blog sources
- For digital agencies, photographers, and visual studios
It is a free monitoring tool that gives a quick overview of any brand’s online presence.
You can choose the company you have interests in and check their biggest influencers, blogs, and networks where people talk about them.
The brand sentiment is also included and you can check freely whether people love or hate their brand, also where in the world people talk about them.
Don’t take your online reputation for granted
Ignoring problems, negative comments or complaints won’t help your reputation nor the success of your campaigns.
Luckily, you can track most of what people are saying about your brand.
There are many free tools you can use to monitor your internet reputation, but data-based monitoring will determine the high-risks that require your immediate action. With these tools, you can effectively create responding scenarios.
Focus on monitoring reviews and comments on social networks and websites where your target audience is engaged.
But don’t stop here! Follow and measure these data and use it to create communication and content strategies.
