If your brand has an online presence at all, you can’t not worry about its reputation. Today, online reputation management (or ORM for short) is not only applicable to every business; ignoring it can cost you customers and money. Here’re just some of the reasons why ORM should be an integral part of your strategy:
Consumers increasingly rely on online research when considering a purchase. 88 percent of buyers research products online before making a purchase (online or in-store); and 86 percent will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative reviews.
Leaving brand reputation to chance can lead to a crisis. Monitoring your reputation and reacting promptly will help you avoid crises and full-on disasters, and prevent negative news about your business from spreading.
Your brand’s online reputation can affect your site’s rankings. It’s official: Google uses an algorithmic solution designed to de-rank sites that offer poor customer experience.
Monitoring your online reputation will give you valuable customer insights: what people love about your product, what they wish they could change, and what they feel is missing.
Now that we’re clear on the benefits of ORM, let’s see which tools can help you facilitate and automate the process.
1. Awario
Monitor what people are saying about your brand across social media and the web, and spot trends with Sentiment Analysis and powerful analytics.
Awario is a social listening tool that makes reputation management easy. The platform will track your brand’s mentions across the major social networks and the web in real-time and let you respond to them right from the app.
To help you spot mentions that require your immediate attention, the tool offers Sentiment Analysis. The Sentiment graph in the dashboard shows you the share of positive and negative mentions of your business, letting you locate spikes you need to address.
On top of that, the tool helps you spot copyright infringements and find people stealing your content. To get started, just create an alert with an extract of your copy in quotes to make the app search for an exact match.
But the real power is in Awario’s competitor analysis capabilities. If you create monitoring alerts for your competition, you’ll be able to listen in on what their customers are happy or unhappy about, and learn from your rivals’ mistakes. Furthermore, you can compare mentions of your brand (in volume, sentiment, reach, and a number of other factors) to competitors’ and see where you’re winning and where you’re lagging behind.
Pricing: Awario offers 3 plans: Starter for individuals ($29/mo), Pro for SMBs ($89/mo), and Enterprise for agencies and big brands ($299/mo). If you go with an annual plan, you’ll get 2 months for free. To try Awario before you settle on a paid plan, sign up for a free trial.
2. Reputology
Monitor and manage online reviews of your local business in real-time.
Reputology helps local businesses track their online reviews. Apart from the common review platforms like Google and Facebook Reviews, Reputology monitors industry-specific review sites, be it real estate, hospitality, or healthcare. Of course, you can also respond to these reviews from the app.
Reputology works particularly well for multi-location businesses that want to keep reviews of each of their locations in one place: it lets you drill down on why certain locations are not doing as well as others, and measure your brand’s overall reputation across locations.
The best bit is, the tool integrates with Hootsuite. The integration lets you monitor and manage your reviews in the same dashboard where you keep your social media accounts – super handy if SMM and review management are both done by the same team in your company.
Pricing: Reputology charges from $10 to $49/mo for every location. You can sign up for a free trial before you settle on a plan.
3. GoFish Digital Complaint Search
Search over 40 complaint websites for negative reviews of your business.
GoFish Digital’s Google-powered complaint search is a handy way to check on your brand’s health. It lets you perform searches on over 40 websites to see if anyone’s filed a complaint against your business (remember, these reviews might potentially start ranking in Google for your brand name!).
From there, you can see which reviews are the most popular, see your brand’s ratings, and respond to complaints on most websites the platform monitors. On some of the sites, you’ll be able to flag or remove reviews if they don’t reflect the reality.
Pricing: Free.
4. SEO SpyGlass
Monitor your backlink profile and prevent spammy, low-quality links from ruining your rankings.
SEO SpyGlass is different from the other tools on this list. While it’s not specifically designed to track a brand’s overall reputation, it helps you monitor and manage the biggest factor of your reputation when it comes to SEO: backlinks. With a whole new backlink index, recently launched in beta (the public release is happening any day now), the tool claims to have the most up-to-date link index on the market.
What’s particularly handy isn’t the data itself though – it’s the analysis the app is capable of. It lets you analyze the authority of each of your links (aka InLink Rank) and measure the Penalty Risk of your backlinks to prevent potential search engine penalties (both algorithmic and manual).
On top of that, the tool offers a Domain Comparison module that lets you compare your link profile to competitors’ to see which aspects of off-page SEO you’re rocking, and which ones you need to work on to catch up.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $124.75 per license. There’s a free version available with a limited number of backlinks to analyze.
5. Grade.us
Real-time social media monitoring with data-rich, customizable reports.
Grade.us is a tool that lets you win more positive reviews from happy customers by automating multi-channel review acquisition campaigns via email or text messages. The tool also monitors new reviews about your business, with a way to respond to them from the app.
For agencies, Grade.us offers white-label reports that reveal trends in the volume of your reviews and let you measure the ROI of your ORM efforts.
Pricing: Grade.us offers 3 plans: Professional ($90/mo), Agency ($200/mo), and Enterprise ($1500/mo). There’s a free trial available if you’d like to test the tool before you commit to a paid plan.
6. Brandwatch
Perform in-depth brand reputation analysis and create powerful, data-rich reports.
Brandwatch is a powerful social listening and analytics tool. With Enterprise-level features like image recognition, trending topics and API access, it is also one of the more costly ones.
The tool offers demographic analysis of the people who’re talking about your brand, including gender, interests, occupation, and location. The platform’s social media coverage includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and local social media sites like Sina Weibo, VK, and QQ.
For those of you who’re ready to invest into a data visualization platform, Brandwatch has a handy tool called Vizia. Vizia lets you visualize your Brandwatch data and combine it with insights from Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, and Hootsuite for a holistic analysis.
Pricing: Brandwatch is an Enterprise-level tool. Prices start at $800/month, with custom Enterprise plans available on request. The tool doesn’t offer a free trial.
7. ReviewTrackers
Keep track of online reviews and encourage happy customers to review your business.
ReviewTrackers does exactly what the name implies – it monitors online reviews of your business across 100+ sites. You can set up email alerts to get notified about important reviews, and build powerful custom reports tailored to your needs. On top of that, ReviewTrackers aggregates your customers’ feedback and shows which aspects of your business customers tend to mention the most.
The platform also offers a mobile app to let you track and respond to reviews on the go.
Pricing: ReviewTrackers’ Professional plan is offered at $49/mo; Enterprise costs $59/mo. The tool has an Agency plan too, with pricing available on request.
8. IFTTT
Set up automated alerts when your brand gets mentioned online.
IFTTT can help you with a million things, and keeping track of your online reputation is one of them. The service lets you create simple, automated tasks that all follow the “if this then that” pattern. You get to decide what this and that stand for.
For reputation management, the service offers a number of helpful integrations. You can track brand mentions on Reddit, receive email alerts or Slack notifications when your company gets mentioned on specific websites, and automatically thank Twitter users for sharing your content.
The tool is also available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android devices.
Pricing: Free.
Take Charge
The 8 tools above will help you take charge of your brand’s online reputation. Whichever platform you settle on, don’t expect them to do all the work for you: check on your monitoring dashboard to spot unusual spikes and respond to reviews (good or bad) promptly. And while dealing with negative reviews is an art of its own, remember that speed and a little humility can go a long way :)
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