Categories: ORM GuideTools

Guide: Best Tools To Monitor Online Reputation

Why is it important to monitor online reputation?

It is very important to monitor your online reputation regularly to keep track of what is being talked about you or your business. The general tendency of customers is that they are more prone to write a review or feedback about your services, products or business if their experience in not good. While on the other hand happy customers are not always motivated to write an endorsement or positive review. Hence it becomes very important to keep your happy customers motivated via a mechanism that can make it easy for them to write a positive feedback about your products or services. At the same time it is also very important to address the complaints of unhappy customers. Businesses that take negative reviews or complaints seriously and address them openly succeed in building the trust among end users.

Important Channels To Monitor

Organic Search

Users or customers in today’s era use internet as a medium for their research. Before making any buying decision, They surf internet to know about the brand or product that they are planning to buy. The search behavior of users at the initial stage when they are still trying to know everything about the product or service is mostly — “product name + reviews” or “business name + reviews” or “product name + ratings” or various other similar terms. This type of searches bring up review and complaint websites where user can easily see the reviews/feedbacks/star ratings etc and make the decision. Hence it becomes very important to monitor and manage seo online reputation to keep the search results clean for all brand or product related keywords.

Social Media Channels

Users as well as businesses are very active on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Almost every business or person has business page on these channels where users can go and write reviews. There are several other ways that users use to show their grievance on social media. They use status updates and tag the business or product name to write review or feedback. When a person uses social media as a channel to know about the business or person or product, these negative feedbacks can spoil the story. Hence it is very important to monitor and manage social reputation. It can be monitored using social reputation management tools.

Review And Complaint Websites

Their are hundreds of review and complaint websites both universal, location specific and niche specific. Customers or users use these as a medium to report their issues and problems be it about a product, person or service. The negative feedback can come in form of negative reviews, complaints or star ratings. Hence it is very important to create a mechanism that can help your happy customers to write about your business on a regular basis. This helps to slowly build up your online reputation on various online channels and helps counter any false reviews or feedback that are being posted by competition or unhappy customers. It actually helps to create various online gateways for your customers to get in touch with you and you can understand the customer grievance and solve it.

Various free and paid tools can help you monitor your online reputation. What it needs is sometime and discipline to create the channels and monitor them.

Small Businesses Reputation Management

For small businesses and local or hyper local businesses like hotels, restaurants, medical centers, hospitals, law firms etc it is mandatory to continuously monitor their online reputation on all popular channels since their consumer or customer base is fixed and a single negative review or complaint can harm the business big time. The fact is that in each business category there are various high authority websites where users can write feedback. Since the review is on a high authority website, it doesn’t not take much time to rank high on search results for your most popular business keywords that is business name or brand name and then it becomes a pain to address such an issue.

For ex – Almost every restaurant or hotel in the world is listed on tripadvisor.com. A few negative reviews and ratings are enough to stop the footfall. In the same way, people can write negative or positive on avvo.com for law professionals and so forth.

Various free and paid reputation monitoring tools are available online that can help track search, social and reviews etc and hence make to able to actively counter such problems. It is not always easy to manage everything by self and this is where an ORM expert is needed. Below is a list of free reputation monitoring tools that any small business can use to keep a track of everything being talked about their business on the web.

List Of Free Or Low Cost E-Reputation Monitoring Tools

  • Google Alerts – Google alerts is a free tool offered by Google where one can create an account for free using their gmail account and set up email alerts for business related keywords such as brand name, product name, service, individuals name etc. As soon as Google finds anything on the web related these keywords, it sends email alerts to the account holder.
  • Social Mention – It is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the internet into a single stream of information. Social mention monitors more than 100 social media platforms including facebook, twitter, digg, youtube etc
  • The Brand Grader – This is a free tool, which quickly gives overview of brands online presence. It gives information about the blogs and websites talking about the brand, positive and negative sentiments and location
  • Reputology –  This tool is not free but is easily affordable orm tool for small business. It has a very valuable reputation management system that provides insights that every big or small brand needs. Reputology monitors reviews on all major review platforms ie Yelp, tripadvisor, Facebook etc and hence offers strong review management system. The best part is that it offers location specific reports.
  • Klout It is a free app where you can connect your social profiles and monitor user engagement from the app itself.

Paid ORM Tools For Monitoring Big Brands Reputation

For big brands or the businesses that are well known, multi location and have huge consumer base, it becomes very important to keep a track of all the chatter going around on the web on product and location level

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