How to Manage & Monitor our Online Reputation?

Friends, Thank you very much for taking out time from your very busy schedule to read my blog(s). I really feel encouraged after reading your feedback in the comments column. Friends, presenting 70th blog - “How to manage & monitor our online reputation”. 

Online Reputation

Reputation of an individual or the organisation and its promoters, products, and or services on various digital platforms on World Wide Web (internet) including social media e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and WhatsApp.

Online Reputation Management

Every day, people are reviewing companies with star ratings, comments, social media posts, blogs and much more. Knowing what people are saying about a company or an organisation is very useful. Online reputation management (ORM) is about monitoring and improving how our business is viewed online. It means looking and analyzing what our target audience or general public at large would like to discover about our organisation, brand, product and or service when they perform an online search. Online reputation management includes monitoring online reputation, addressing any online content or customer feedback that could damage the brand, and using strategies to prevent and solve problems that could damage online reputation of an organisation.

Online reputation management is vital for organisations to maintain a positive brand identity in the eyes of its target publics. Online reputation management provides us with a chance to counter negative feedback. It also creates an opportunity to promote the experience of our positive mentions. An effective online reputation management strategy can provide us with new opportunities and insight on increasing brand awareness. As digital marketers understand the value of ORM in growing their business, they choose to devote more time and energy toward monitoring their brand online.

Social media monitoring

Social media monitoring is the act of monitoring social media for information relevant to our business. For example, we might want to know about:

·         Brand mentions (with or without direct tagging, aka @mention)

·         Relevant hashtags #

·         Mentions of our competitors

·         General trends that apply to our industry

Social media monitoring helps in tracking key social metrics like brand awareness and social share of voice. We can also use this information to test messaging and measure ROI. Once we start collecting this valuable data, we can use it to look for trends and insights. Take action based on our findings, and we’ve moved on from the simple task of social media monitoring into the more complex work of social listening.

Difference between Social Media Monitoring & Social Listening

Social media monitoring is about the past, and social listening is about the future. Social media monitoring is about gathering information i.e. collecting all the data and details we can. We capture what people are posting about us. We measure what we have already achieved, and create a record of what is happening in our industry’s social space.

The social listening part is more active and strategic. We analyze the data for actionable insights. This could from engaging a happy customer to shifting our brand positioning strategy. Social listening uses the data we gather to improve our social media strategy.

Steps to set up social media monitoring

Decide what topic is to monitor

The list of keywords, topics, and usernames we’re to monitor will likely grow and evolve over time. Therefore, we should start by monitoring a small set of topics that are directly related to our brand:

·         Our Brand Name

·         Our Brand Handle(s)

·         Our Product Name(s)

·         Our Slogan

·         Our Branded Hashtags

·         Names of Key Management Persons i.e. CEO, COO, CFO, CMO etc.

·         Names of Spokespersons

·         Our Competitors’ Brand Names, Product Names, Slogans, Hashtags, and Handles

·         Unbranded Industry Hashtags

·         Industry Keywords

Friends, we should not limit our self to monitor simple keywords or key phrases. We should also use combinations of keywords to identify intent in social signals. For example, we can try adding the word “recommend” to a keyword related to our organisation or product or the industry.  We’ll start to see people actively seeking information on products like ours. We’ll also see how others in the industry respond. Here are some valuable qualifying keywords to add to our social monitoring streams:

·         Recommend

·         Suggest

·         Help

·         Improve

·         Explain

·         Favorite

·         Best

 Social Media Monitoring Tools

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool first and foremost; Ahrefs offers a much deeper dive into our link profile. We can see all of the links coming to our site, what the anchor text was, and the strength of the domain. This is all very handy for tracking who is talking about us and our site online very easily. 

BirdEye

BirdEye is a SaaS reputation management tool used by more than 50,000 businesses, collects feedback from over 150 online review sources to ensure you have the full-picture regarding your brand's online reputation. SaaS stands for ‘software as a service”.  We can monitor, promote, and respond to reviews within one dashboard, additionally we can use BirdEye to request reviews from customers on both desktop and mobile devices, or on BirdEye's own messenger tool. Along with review monitoring, BirdEye provides features to manage our social media accounts, gain insight into our competitors' customers, and create surveys and tickets to further improve our customer's overall experience with our brand.

 

Brands Eye

Brands Eye constantly scours the internet to find any mentions of the brand based on the pre-defined metrics selected by the customer. This can include social, broadcast, print, and online media sources. The algorithm then processes the data to ensure relevancy and accuracy. The processed data is sent to a group of real people to make sure the data is contextually relevant before being visually processed for the brand to review. 

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is one of the go-to social media monitoring and analytics tools when it comes to sentiment analysis. It analyzes brand sentiment, shows trends, and has a cool feature called “image insights”. The feature identifies images associated with our brand’s logo in the same way that topics can be associated with our brand’s name. This means that when we upload our brand’s logo, the tool finds images on the web that include that logo. 

Brandwatch has three different services; Brandwatch Analytics, the Vizia Platform, and Brandwatch Audiences. The Analytics service uses 70 million sources to create a comprehensive overview of our brand’s image. It shows exactly where individual mentions are found and the type of social reach they experienced.

Buzzsumo

Most people use Buzzsumo to generate content ideas and to make sure they are choosing topics people are interested in. However, it can also be effectively used to track mentions of our brand as well as mentions involving competing brands. Instead of setting up alerts for the latest trends it is possible to input our brand name, or that of a competitor, and receive alerts for mentions in real time. 

Cision

Cision Communications Cloud lets us track our brand mentions across millions of online stories, as well as any social media mentions. Best of all, Cision helps us reach audiences across traditional, digital, and social platforms, ensuring our brand is consistently successful across all marketing channels. While Cision provides tools to ensure that we're able to monitor and protect our online brand. Its features are particularly impressive for strategic, proactive PR outreach. For instance, Cision helps us find media outlets and specific contacts within the industry to reach out with pitches, or figure out which industry influencers can best help spread our message and positively impact our brand's image.

Crowd Analyzer

If the brand or its customers are based in the Middle East, Crowd Analyzer is an important analytics and social media monitoring tool. As the first Arabic-focused social media monitoring platform, Crowd Analyzer analyzes “Arabic content in terms of relevancy, dialect and sentiment.” It monitors not only major social networks, but also blogs, forums, and news sites.

Glassdoor

Glassdoor is an effective way to find out exactly what current and past employees are saying about our company. This tool can also give valuable insight into how the employees feel about competing brands and what we can do to ensure that our company culture is evolving to meet the needs of employees. There is even a place for reviewers to give feedback on company CEOs and interviewing procedures.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a simple but very effective way to monitor our industry and our brand, and they’re completely free to use. We can set up alerts for as many keywords as we like. We’ll receive an email alert whenever Google finds new results – such as blog mentions or news articles – for those terms. 

How Sociable

How Sociable monitors brand reputation across a total of 36 social media networks, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, EBay, Etsy, and Instagram. It has a broad scope and breaks down the information into intuitive magnitude scores that range from 0-10 to quickly show users the level of activity their brand experienced on specific channels. The site also has a feature that allows users to compare their magnitude score with that of brands of similar size and niche. 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite has many valuable uses, from scheduling tweets to managing multiple social media profiles to monitoring what people are saying about us across multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, and more. As a bonus, the free version offers Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Twitter profile stats, and ow.ly click stats. Ow.ly is a tool that enables us to shorten links and track that comes from those links. Owly can be used to measure our social ROI as well. 

Hubspot’s Website Grader

Our website is a crucial part of our reputation strategy. This free tool from Hubspot shows us how well our brand is doing across three crucial areas of our marketing i.e. top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and analytics  and assigns a grade for our website and social networking based on the results. The tool also gives us free recommendations on how to improve our score.

Hyper Alerts

If our Facebook page is an important part of our marketing strategy and digital presence, this tool will help us monitor their activity and get instant email notifications. With Hyper Alerts, one can get unlimited updates and we don’t need to be a page administrator. This means we can also use it to monitor competitor pages via email alerts.

If This Then That

“If This Then That” is a relatively new automation tool that allows us to “put the internet to work for us”. We can connect several online platforms and devices between them, so that we can create a so-called “recipe”, an automation script that can help us get notifications, deals, content backups and much more. We can also select one of the public recipes and replicate what other people are doing with ITTT. When it comes to online reputation management, this service can be very useful too. We can browse recipes to find the best one to monitor our favorite platform and keywords.

Image Raider

Sometimes a picture is worth one thousand words. Is somebody using our images? With Image Raider we can perform an automated reverse image search and discover websites talking about us without mentioning our name and people stealing or distorting our pictures. We have to just add the URL of the images we want to monitor, or upload the files. The system will then perform an automated search and alert us via email whenever something significant gets indexed. A premium paid service allows us to monitor hundreds of images.

LexisNexis

Tracking broadcast and print media is pretty tricky, unless we’ve got people reading every newspaper and watching every channel. LexisNexis’s Newsdesk track mentions in thousands of publications and analyze the results too.

Mention

Mention is a tried and tested social media monitoring app. Mention monitors brand mentions on major social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and the web. Mention's sentiment analysis is available in all plans - the tool sorts mentions into positive, negative, and neutral, making it easy for us to measure our brand’s reputation, see how it changes over time and what influences such shifts. 

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics scans web and social sources to look for mentions of our brand, even when we’re not tagged. We’ll also see the emotion and sentiment information for every mention, so that we can tell at a glance when there’s an issue we need to address.

NetBase

NetBase uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to find online conversations relevant to our brand. We can also access old social posts so that we can dig back into issues and conversations we might have missed in the past.

Pin Alerts

Pinterest is becoming an increasingly influential platform, especially in some industries. Knowing what’s being shared about us can be very important for our reputation. When we want to know that what someone has pinned something from our website, Pin Alerts is the solution.  With Pin Alerts we can setup a quick and easy alert that will notify us via email in a matter of minutes whenever a new pin comes up.

Reddit search

With its 330 million average monthly active users and 14 billion average views per month, Reddit is a social site one can’t ignore. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro allows us to monitor the site that bills itself as “the front page of the internet” for relevant keywords and phrases. We’ll learn who is talking about our brand, business, or competitors in the site’s 138,000 active communities.

ReviewTrackers 

ReviewTrackers lets us monitor over 50 review websites in one place. If we use the tool within our Hootsuite dashboard, we can easily share positive reviews to our social networks and manage review profiles by location and user.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a website ranking site.  A free tool, it gives a very good idea of how our website, the face for our brand, performs online.
But SimilarWeb is also an enterprise monitoring tool that’ll tell us a lot more about our website.

 

Its biggest value is that it lets us benchmark our website against competitors for factors such as time on site, bounce rate, and page views per visit. This helps us to understand how we stack up against the other players in our industry, and make improvements to our site. SimilarWeb also offers a range of digital insights e.g. market research about our industry, which includes brand visibility reports to show how well-known and well-respected our brand is within our field.

 

Socialdraft

Socialdraft sends real-time notifications when a business is mentioned on the web or in social media. Monitoring the general social media sites, it also scans niche sites that specialize in restaurants, travel, medical, legal, and real estate industries. 

 

Social Mention

 

Social Mention offers real-time social media search across over 100 different social networking sites, allowing us to track and monitor our social mentions, our brand, our competitors, our industry, or anything else we want to monitor. They also have a widget that we can add to our website to display real time buzz about our brand. If ours is a large company with hundreds of daily mentions across the web and a recognized brand, Social Mention can not only help us track them, but also analyse data from several sources to understand what’s their sentiment and their origin.

Social Searcher 

Social Searcher monitors social mentions and the web and it's free for up to 100 keyword searches per day. The app also performs sentiment analysis for the mentions that it finds, while we can also upgrade to “Premium Monitoring”, which will increase the amount of keyword searches we can conduct. The tool monitors not only top social networks, but also more local and niche ones, such as Flickr, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and VK.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social media management tool that's laser focused on tracking a brand's global online reputation and sentiment through online, social, print, TV, and radio. The tool generates actionable insights and competitive metrics.  Talkwalker is a marketing tool that can boost our brand reputation and help maintain our marketing campaigns as well. We can get complete insights of how people talk about our brand on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

The Brand Grader

The Brand Grader gives us a quick overview of a brand’s online presence in seconds. We’re to just choose the company or product we’re interested in, and we’ll see their biggest web influencers - major blogs and news sites talking about them online, their top sources - see whether most of their mentions come from forums, images, or news sites, brand sentiment - whether people speak about them positively or negatively and location of mentions - where in the world people talk them.

Topsy

Topsy is a great social analytics tool. With Topsy we can scan the whole web looking for mentions of our interest. What sets this service apart is the fact that it has indexed every tweet ever posted. If we’re looking for a mention tracking tool that goes back to 2006, Topsy is a great option.

Trackur

Trackur monitors mainstream social media sites, social networks, forums, images, and videos. It allows us to audit up to 50 keyword searches, and determines the sentiment of ratings and their influence.

Tweet Alarm

More than 5,000 tweets are shared every second. We can search the ones that are about us via Twitter Search, but if we want to create an automatic monitoring system, Tweet Alarm is the perfect solution. This useful “Google Alert for Twitter” will send us email alerts whenever someone tweets about our brand, products or anything that interests us. Prior registration is required with Google to use this tool.

Tweetdeck

This is a great tool for community managers using Twitter, but it also has some functionality for monitoring Twitter only. We can set up search columns that will give us a live feed when anything we’ve specified is mentioned. This is particularly good for brand mentions and is free.

Thank you for reading the blog. Cheers……..

 

 

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