Are you searching for online reputation monitoring or how to monitor my brand reputation online?

Jeff Bezos put it best: “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Is it good? Is it bad? Even worse, are people indifferent? Discovering your brand’s internet reputation is critical to your business’s success. Luckily, while once we had to rely on anonymous feedback cards or trust what people said to our face, we can now use metrics, reviews, and more to monitor your brand’s internet reputation.

Here’s another quote by Steve Jobs: “a brand is simply trust”. He’s not wrong. In fact, 57% of consumers report solely using businesses with a 4+-star rating. Dip below that high benchmark, and you’ll lose a sizable pool of potential customers. Why? Because they just don’t trust you – they trust what other people say.

You prevent such pitfalls with online reputation monitoring (or dig yourself out of a negative review loop). Below we’ll explain the ins and outs of online review monitoring, delving into how you can monitor your brand’s internet reputation. And we’ll also detail what to do about a negative review.

Need help with your company reputation management? Contact us for a free consultation!

Why online reputation monitoring is so important

Bad reviews can hurt your business. With a few off-hand, negative comments, brands watch thousands of dollars in potential customers dry up before their eyes. It’s not hard to find such stories.

Even if you don’t suffer a withering review, engaging with customers can help maintain positive relations. For instance, Wix – the website builder – routinely answers queries and responds to comments in their subreddit.

Customers feel heard, and even a negative featu

re can be turned into an opportunity to create loyalty. Indeed, 95% of Microsoft survey respondents cite customer service as an essential component of brand loyalty – it’s often a major reason for switching brands.

On the other hand, online review monitoring also is a chance to sample public opinion. What are you doing well? And where do you need to improve? You can pre-empt further negative feedback by addressing the underlying criticism – explaining the situation or rectifying the problem.

Tools for online reputation monitoring

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the ultimate online reputation monitoring tool for beginners: best of all, it’s free. All you need to do is enter your company name – you can then create an alert to notify you about your mentions based on your preferences.

Of course, if a review doesn’t mention your business directly, you won’t see the review. But it’s an excellent tool for sampling your overall feedback. And as online review monitoring tools go, it’s one of the most reliable.

2. Social Mention

More sophisticated than Google Alerts, Social Mention monitors more than 80 social media platforms for brand mentions. You’ll be able to track several different factors:

• Strength refers to the likelihood people are talking about your brand.
• Sentiments are the ratio of positive to negative mentions.
• Passion refers to the likelihood that people talking about your brand do so repeatedly.
• Reach refers to the number of unique authors talking about your brand.

Marketing itself as “real-time social media search and analysis” it’s a comprehensive tool that functions across all the top social media platforms. And, like Google Alerts, you can set up email alerts to keep you up-to-date with what consumers are saying.

3. Reputology

Reputology is among the most advanced platforms for monitoring your brand’s internet reputation. Unlike other online reputation monitoring tools, Reputology monitors over 100 review sites, including Google My Business, iPhone App Store, Facebook, and more, distilling all the information into easy-to-understand core metrics.

It’s a complete diagnostic of your company’s online reputation.

Your team can focus their efforts where needed by harnessing this data, thereby boosting your reputation. Even better, Reputology also identifies the root cause of customer complaints. With their service, you can automate how you receive feedback and reviews, helping resolve issues in real-time.

The service has a 5-star rating on G2 Crowd and Capterra, so it’s a popular tool among industry professionals.

4.  Mention

Like an upgraded Social Mention, Mention is a comprehensive service for social media monitoring. In fact, Mention monitors over 1 billion sources across the web daily, making finding what customers are saying about your brand an absolute dream.

You can filter out the noise and spot patterns amongst customer feedback. Oh, and their analytics platform is impressive. With data-rich reports and detailed trends, you’ll remain one step ahead of your competition.

Consider Mention if you’re looking for a tool that combines everything in a single user-friendly platform. However, it’s not free due to the sheer depth of its functionality.

5. Brand24

Brand24’s online reputation monitoring tool is ready to help you follow up on positive comments from brand ambassadors or respond to dissatisfied customers. You can reply with lightning speed by instant notifications about negative mentions, preventing a story from getting ahead of you.

You’ll also have access to their automated sentiment analysis tool – which detects positive, negative, and neutral mentions.

You can expand your company’s reach, develop customer loyalty, and even track hashtags in social media campaigns by learning from Brand24’s in-depth reports.

It’s a trusted online review monitoring platform for Uber, GSK, and Stanford University, amongst others.

6.  SEMrush

SEMrush is an industry titan for market analysis. Using its Market Explorer, Traffic Analytics, and other tools, you can track online mentions, including sentiment scores and resource authority.

The genius of the platform is that its reach stretches across the web. You can spot industry influencers, find mentions without backlinks, and track referral traffic from mentions where other platforms wouldn’t find anything.

Oh, and it’s fully integrated into its SEO management system. So, you can analyze a mention’s resource authority to see how it impacts your ranking on Google.

If you want an SEO-integrated method to monitor your brand’s internet reputation, SEMrush is it.

For more information, please contact our team today to help improve your brand’s visibility & reputation online.