Getting featured on reputable sites is every business owner’s dream. It not only gives your business the much needed exposure but also helps in online reputation management. However, not every online mention or feature is favourable for your Brand, and this is where one needs to follow certain Online Reputation Management tips to stay one step ahead of these situations.
For a business to grow, the image of the brand needs to be managed well. Of course, brands do take adequate corrective measures when things go wrong. But these measures still are “corrective”. It should transcend from just corrective measures to being prepared for any contingency to handle any untoward situation.
What if someone steals some of your ideas or product features and makes them their own? How do you search from the million of websites online without being tech savvy?
It is important for brands to:
- Understand the audience: Understand the worldview of your audience and how they react to typical situations. Do they immediately tweet if things go wrong in your service delivery? What type of content they dislike, which social media channels they use and how would they react if something unpleasant happened? Knowing the answers to these can go a long way to understanding your audience
- Become Transparent: There is no point in making your company appear as a multinational corporation
when you’re bootstrapping with a handful of employees. Be Transparent in your operations to build trust among your audience. You won’t have to worry at all if you’re not hiding anything. - Become Social Listeners: This is where Online Reputation Management tools come in handy. They help you prepare for untoward situations related to your brand and help tackle problems before they get blown out of proportion.
10 best online reputation management and social media monitoring tools for business
Given your business priorities, it’s only reasonable if you can’t figure out time to track your business reputation online.
Here’s a collection of free and paid tools that can help you manage your brand reputation online without having to spend too much time and without any advanced technical knowledge.
Let’s have a look.
Free Tools
Google Alerts
With Google being the primary search source for everyone, having a Google alert for your preferred topic is the best way to keep a tab on your brand.
Include a specific search query, select the frequency and select the right channel you would want to monitor.
For e.g.
Simplilearn
Simplilearn.com
Simplilearn courses
Social Mention
Social Mention is a free tool that monitors brand mentions across sites and provides information on the sentiments towards your brand. In turn, the tools also shows how these sentiments impact your author/mention ratio, influence and as a result, the number of conversations generated.
Image Raider
ImageRaider is an excellent tool especially if your business is dependent on images – photography or design websites or even websites in general
It searches for your images on the web, indexes them and alerts you if they are wrongly used or inaccurately sourced.
Mention
The fact that Mention monitors billions of sources in over 40 languages almost eliminates the chances of you missing any mentions of your brand online. Also, since the data is real-time, you can always reply to these mentions right away within the tool.
It offers a free trial. You can create an alert for your brand name and select the social network where your users are active. Every time someone mentions your brand online you will get an alert in your inbox.
Queryz
Queryz is a tool that helps you know more about your website visitors. Using this tool as a microsurvey can help you identify your visitors. In short, if you are looking for simple feedback from your visitors, this is your tool.
This survey by customizing customer queries, can help address specific issues that your business can solve.
It’s simple to set up, click on “Create new survey”, add your own title, select the template, edit your question form, edit the target options and click on “Activate survey”
If This Then That (IFTTT)
IFTTT, with its simple interface, gives you a number of options to be updated with the information you need.
From home, work, productivity and news alerts, you can route all information into one email without having to spend time on multiple sites. The advantage of this tool is that it connects multiple devices and lets you select a recipe that is suitable for you – from simple notifications to content details, etc.
Paid Tools
Radian
For a business having a sizeable turnover, Radian (that merged with Salesforce) is an in-depth tool that gives you real-time insights about your customers, competitors and influencers. It helps track brand mentions across the social landscape. The engagement console serves as an end-to-end presence management tool.
It provides a comprehensive coverage including millions of blogs, comments, Facebook API, twitter and discussions on the social web.
It has an interactive dashboard that links internal monitoring with your external activity on your blog, Facebook and Twitter account.
There’s a fee of $600/month if you sign up. But as an educator or student, there’s a free trial you can avail.
Sysomos Heartbeat
If social monitoring is on your mind, then Sysomos’s Heartbeat is an ideal tool that provides snapshots of social conversions in a user-friendly graph and chart format. At $500/month, it provides team collaboration and many ways to interact with influencers. It also helps manage workflow and conversations.
Lithium
Lithium provides search-specific mentions and sentiments from social media. It scans Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and many other platforms. The tool has a convenient graph and chart format. It also gives you the opportunity to assess the emotions before, during and after a brand campaign. There’s a 14-day free trial and at $249/ month it allows 5 users and 5 searches.
BrandsEye
If you’re a blogger, business owner or large organisation BrandsEye has separate packages for all ranging from $1 to higher rates. Depending on the number of keywords required these packages can deliver scores of brand mentions online and show you how they impact your online reputation.
Using these tools is one aspect of managing your reputation online. Creating a positive image and hence better reviews through these tools is an effective way to start your online reputation management.
Did we miss out any tool? Let us know in the comments if there’s an even better tool we can include.