Online Reputation Monitoring Basics
To maintain a positive reputation, staying up-to-date with what is being said about your brand online and addressing any issues before they escalate is essential. This is where online reputation monitoring tools come into play. These tools help you keep track of mentions, reviews, and feedback about your brand so that you can take timely action.
In this article, we will explore the importance of online reputation monitoring, how it is done, the benefits it offers, and the top tools available for effective reputation monitoring. Whether you are a small business owner or a marketing professional, understanding the significance of online reputation monitoring and utilizing the right tools can make a substantial difference in managing and enhancing your brand’s reputation.
Why is Online Reputation Monitoring Important?
Your online reputation directly reflects your brand’s image and can greatly impact your success. In today’s digital landscape, people rely heavily on online reviews and feedback when making purchasing decisions. According to a study, 93% of consumers say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. Therefore, it is important to actively monitor and manage your online reputation to ensure that your target audience perceives your brand positively.
“Your brand isn’t what you say it is; it’s what Google says it is.”
– Chris Anderson
Online reputation monitoring allows you to track what people say about your brand across various platforms. It helps you identify customer sentiments, trends, and areas of improvement. By proactively monitoring your digital reputation, you can promptly address any negative feedback or issues, enhance customer relationships, and gain a competitive advantage.
How is Reputation Monitoring Done?
Online reputation monitoring is not passive; it requires active listening and timely action. You need to follow a strategic approach to monitor your online reputation effectively. Here are the key steps involved in online reputation monitoring:
1. Identify the Platforms to Monitor
Reputation monitoring goes beyond just monitoring your owned channels. While it is essential to monitor social mentions, review listings, and direct feedback channels, you should also consider other platforms where conversations about your brand might be happening.
For example, B2B brands focused on LinkedIn or industry-specific platforms may be unaware of discussions happening on platforms like Reddit. It is important not to make assumptions about where your customers hang out and talk. Consider the platforms people use on their path to purchase and include them in your monitoring strategy.
2. Scope the Terms, Hashtags, and Keywords to Monitor
To effectively monitor your online reputation, you need to determine the terms, hashtags, and keywords that are relevant to your brand. These can include branded searches, product-related keywords and phrases, industry terms, and competitor-related terms.
Social listening tools can help you identify the specific terms and language used by your audience. It is also beneficial to collaborate with your sales and customer success teams to gain insights into the terms and phrases commonly used by your customers. By monitoring these keywords, you can stay informed about what people are saying about your brand and industry.
3. Analyze Your Reputation Over Time
To gain a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s reputation, it is important to analyze your reputation over time. This involves tracking conversations relevant to your brand consistently and at scale. By doing so, you can identify trends, strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
Social media sentiment analysis tools can be particularly useful in analyzing how your audience feels about your brand. These tools can help you uncover both positive and negative sentiments, allowing you to take action accordingly to enhance your brand’s reputation.
4. Linking it all Together with a Reputation Monitoring Tool
While it is possible to track online conversations manually, monitoring every digital conversation manually is not feasible due to the sheer volume of data. This is where reputation monitoring tools come into play. These tools help you aggregate and analyze brand-related conversations from various online sources.
Reputation management software, such as Sprout Social, is a popular choice among brands for monitoring reputation. These tools offer features like social listening, collaborative workspaces, reporting and analytics, multichannel notifications, and integration with CRM systems. Choosing the right reputation monitoring tool can greatly enhance your online reputation management efforts.
Benefits of Online Reputation Monitoring
Online reputation monitoring offers several benefits for brands. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key advantages:
1. Increases Brand Awareness Through Listening
Effective online reputation monitoring can increase brand awareness by encouraging more conversations about your brand. By actively listening and engaging with your audience, you can foster a culture of conversation, which leads to increased brand visibility.
When brands respond to reviews and feedback in a public and authentic manner, they not only build visibility but also showcase their brand in a positive light. By actively monitoring and engaging with their audience, they can create a snowball effect of brand awareness and positive sentiment.
2. Enhances Customer Relationships
Online reputation monitoring is not just about monitoring your brand but also understanding your customers better. By actively monitoring conversations about your brand, you can uncover strengths and weaknesses in how you serve your customers.
Monitoring customer feedback can help you identify areas where you can improve your customer care, product features, and overall customer experience. It also presents opportunities to delight your dedicated customers and strengthen your relationships with them.
3. Gain a Competitive Advantage by Tracking Trends
Online reputation monitoring is invaluable for competitive analysis. By tracking relevant industry and product-related conversations, you can understand what sets your competitors apart, where you can be more effective, and share frustrations among your target audience.
Monitoring conversations about your competitors can help you identify product features or new products that outshine your own. It can also provide insights into areas where you can improve, such as customer care or onboarding processes. By staying informed about industry trends and pain points, you can adapt your marketing messages and strategies to better resonate with your target audience.
4. Avoid and Prevent Social Media Crises
Effective online reputation monitoring can help you identify and address potential social media crises before they escalate. By monitoring conversations and trends, you can detect early warning signs of a crisis and take immediate action to mitigate any negative impact.
For example, a sudden flood of negative reviews or mentions can signify a social media PR crisis. By being proactive and monitoring these issues, you can address them before they have a chance to snowball and cause significant damage to your brand’s reputation.
5. Empower the Rest of Your Organization with Timely Data
A strong online reputation benefits your marketing team and the rest of your organization. By monitoring and analyzing customer feedback, you can provide valuable insights to your sales team, customer success team, and other departments.
Positive sentiment and reviews can make selling your products or services easier for your sales team. Your customer success team can gain insights into customer satisfaction and identify areas where additional support is needed. Sharing timely data with your organization can align your teams and enhance your overall business operations.
Top Online Reputation Monitoring Tools
Now that we understand the importance of online reputation monitoring, let’s explore some of the top tools available for effective reputation monitoring:
1. Google Alerts
The grand-dad of monitoring. Google Alerts is a free tool offered by Google. It lets you set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases, including your company name. You will receive email notifications whenever your specified keywords are mentioned online, helping you stay informed about what is being said about your brand.
2. Social Mention
Social Mention is a free tool that monitors over 80 social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It provides insights into the strength, sentiment, passion, and reach of conversations about your brand. Social Mention helps you measure, monitor, and improve your brand’s reputation across social media platforms.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing tool that offers reputation monitoring features. It allows you to monitor online mentions, sentiment scores, and resource authority. With SEMrush, you can track referral traffic from mentions, identify sentiment associated with your brand, and analyze mentioning resource authority.
4. SentiOne
SentiOne is an AI-powered listening tool that helps you pay attention to what your customers say about your brand. It provides real-time and historical data, allowing you to track mentions of your brand and other relevant keywords across thousands of web sources. SentiOne offers sentiment analysis and filtering options, making managing the information you receive easier.
5. Reputology
Reputology is a review management and monitoring platform designed for multi-location businesses. It helps you monitor and manage reviews on social media sites and industry-specific review sites. Reputology converts negative reviews into customer service tickets, allowing you to address issues promptly. It also provides multi-level reporting for corporate, regional, or store-level analysis.
6. ReviewPush
ReviewPush is an online review management software that helps businesses with multiple locations monitor social media and popular review sites. The tool aggregates reviews from various sites into one dashboard, allowing you to respond to reviews directly from your inbox. ReviewPush also helps you discover review sites where your business is not yet listed and provides multi-level reporting for performance analysis.
7. Chatmeter
Chatmeter is a customer feedback and review monitoring platform designed for multi-location brands and agencies. It notifies you of reviews on over 20 local search and review sites. Chatmeter also allows you to monitor your local competitors and provides a brand visibility score to compare your online presence with your competitors.
8. RankRanger
RankRanger is primarily an SEO tool but also offers a reputation manager feature. It allows you to check search engine results for negative or slanderous content and monitors SERP changes. With RankRanger, you can analyze how your reputation management efforts impact your visibility in search engine results.
9. Meltwater
Meltwater is a media monitoring tool that goes beyond press monitoring. It offers social media listening and real-time analytics to help you track mentions, sentiment, and media coverage. Meltwater also provides global media database access and lets you create reports and presentations directly from the dashboard.
10. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media management tool that offers reputation monitoring features. It allows you to manage your social media channels, schedule content, and monitor sentiment trends. Hootsuite’s social intelligence features help you make data-driven decisions and align your social media strategy with your reputation management efforts.
11. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo, known for its content research capabilities, also offers brand monitoring services. It allows you to keep an eye on media coverage, monitor competitors, and respond to industry news. BuzzSumo can help you stay informed about what is being said about your brand and industry and make informed decisions based on the insights gained.
Conclusion
In conclusion, online reputation monitoring is critical to your digital marketing strategy. It lets you stay informed about what people say about your brand online and take timely action to address any issues. By actively monitoring your online reputation, you can enhance brand awareness, improve customer relationships, gain a competitive advantage, prevent social media crises, and empower your organization with valuable data.
To effectively monitor your online reputation, it is essential to utilize the right tools. The tools mentioned in this article, such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, SEMrush, SentiOne, Reputology, ReviewPush, Chatmeter, RankRanger, Meltwater, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo, offer various features to help you track and manage your online reputation.
Remember, your online reputation is a reflection of your brand’s success. By proactively monitoring and managing your online reputation, you can strengthen your brand’s image, build trust with your audience, and drive business growth.
Resources and Further Reading
- Study on the Influence of Online Reviews on Purchasing Decisions: This study highlights how 93% of consumers are influenced by online reviews when making purchasing decisions.
- Sprout Social: A popular tool for reputation management, offering features like social listening, collaborative workspaces, and integration with CRM systems.
- Google Alerts: Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to monitor the web for new content about a specific topic, sending you email notifications whenever it finds new results matching your specified keywords or phrases.
- Social Mention: A free tool that monitors over 80 social media sites, providing insights into the strength, sentiment, passion, and reach of conversations about your brand.
- SEMrush: A comprehensive digital marketing tool that includes reputation monitoring features to track online mentions, sentiment scores, and resource authority. Reputation X uses SEMrush extensively.
- SentiOne: An AI-powered listening tool that offers real-time and historical data on brand mentions across thousands of web sources, with sentiment analysis and filtering options.
- Reputology: A review management and monitoring platform for multi-location businesses, converting negative reviews into customer service tickets and providing multi-level reporting.
- ReviewPush: An online review management software for businesses with multiple locations, aggregating reviews from various sites into one dashboard for easy management.
- Chatmeter: A customer feedback and review monitoring platform for multi-location brands and agencies, offering competitor monitoring and a brand visibility score.
- RankRanger: Primarily an SEO tool, it also offers a reputation manager feature to monitor search engine results for negative content and track the impact of reputation management efforts.
- Meltwater: A media monitoring tool that extends beyond press monitoring to include social media listening and real-time analytics, tracking mentions, sentiment, and media coverage.
- Hootsuite: A comprehensive social media management tool that includes reputation monitoring features, allowing you to manage channels, monitor sentiment trends, and align social media strategies with reputation management.
- BuzzSumo: Known for content research, BuzzSumo also offers brand monitoring services to monitor media coverage, monitor competitors, and respond to industry news.
