The Best Business Online Reputation Management Tools

We hope you are already convinced that you must track the online reputation of your business and do so with regularity. However, because the Internet is a vast space, it’s difficult for businesses tracking their online reputation to be everywhere all the time.

If you do this the old-fashioned way, i.e. by manually entering your brand name into Google search and checking your social media feeds continuously, it will consume many hours of your day. It doesn’t need to because there are a number of time-saving tools in the market that also help you do a very good job of it.

Some of these are free, while others are quite pricey.

Google Alerts is one of the first to come to mind but we aren’t going to dwell on it, even though it is an excellent tool for businesses to make use of, because it is widely used and almost anybody with commercial savvy is aware of it.

We are casting our look further and wider in this post, though we do begin with an old favorite.

Here are some suggestions (in no particular order) to make the job of managing your online reputation easier for you.

Social Mention

This is an easy-peasy tool to use which “searches content from across the universe.” You enter the name of your brand into its search engine and it will dig up all the references it can to get you the mentions you’ve earned. Beware though that it may well return results that have nothing to do with you. All the businesses/organizations around the world that share their name with you will show up too. You’ll have to be specific in your search to get the best results (much as Google itself).

On the right hand side of the search results this tool will display your scores related to your strength (the frequency of the mentions you earn in the social media), the user sentiment surrounding you (the ratio of the positive-to-negative reviews received by you), the passion you inspire (the likelihood of people talking about you repeatedly), and your reach (the range of influence). If you score low on all the fronts, you know you have work to do.

Why don’t you pull up this tool right now and enter your brand name into it? Social Mention is free to use, which makes it a no-brainer for businesses to refer to. It’s simple, yet effective, and brings you data from blogs, microblogs, comments, events, news, audio, video, Q&A, and all the prominent social networks. You can also set up social media alerts around your chosen keywords to be informed of the social mentions you earn.

Trackur

If your brand has a wide presence on the Internet, you are going to need a tool that will cover it all for you. Trackur happens to be one such application providing wide coverage.

With Trackur you can monitor the comments and reviews on all the social media sites and numerous other sources. Trackur tracks Facebook, Twitter, Google+ tumblr, Instagram, flickr, YouTube, news, blogs, forums as well as online reviews to bring you all the mentions your brand is receiving. You can archive conversations, bookmark them, and also share them with your team.

These features don’t come cheap, however. Plans start at $97 per month and go up to $447 per month, which many businesses would find rather steep. You can try it out for free for 10 days to determine its usefulness for you. Because of the comprehensive nature of this tool and the high price it comes at, Trackur is more suited to businesses who are very active on the Internet and for whom tracking all their online mentions by themselves is a tough ask.

Review Trackers

For businesses in industries that are heavily impacted by online reviews (the hospitality industry, for example), subscribing to a review management tool may prove to be useful.

ReviewTrackers lets you track all your online reviews from more than 50 review websites, including all the major and industry-specific ones. It alerts you to new reviews, and allows you to monitor multiple locations at once, respond to reviews from within the application, as well as request user reviews.

ReviewPush is another option in this regard with similar features, but it covers a lesser number of review websites. It actively monitors and collects reviews from Google, Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare, Yahoo, and YellowPages, to name a few sources.

By bringing to your attention all the reviews associated with your business, both ReviewTrackers and ReviewPush help you address them before they do any damage to your online reputation.

You can try out both these applications for free for 30 days, after which plans start from $29 per month for ReviewPush. To learn of the exact pricing for ReviewTrackers, you may have to contact them, depending on your location.

More Specifically…

There are plenty of tools that target particular needs of businesses.

Pin Alerts (for Pinterest), Hyper Alerts (for Facebook and Twitter), and TweetAlarm and Topsy (both for Twitter) are reliable tools specific to certain social media sites, so you might want to consider them if you are more active on one social network than others.

Some of the other tools, which aren’t exactly online reputation management tools, can also be used for this purpose. Ubersuggest, for example, can be employed to track conversations surrounding your brand name – in the form of keywords, while this complaint search box will bring to your notice any complaints aimed at your brand name in over 20 complaint sites, so that you can address them immediately and prevent a dip in your reputation.

Monitor This will pull out for you your brand-related information from 20 search engines, while BoardTracker will bring to you mentions of your company on discussion boards and online forums.

In Conclusion

With online reputation management, knowledge indeed is power.

You have scores of options in this field that can quickly bring you a ton of data to track and improve your online presence. But in the end, how much you are able to extract out of them depends entirely on your imagination and your enthusiasm for the work involved.