Are you listening to what people are saying about your brand? Sure you post on social media and read your comments and replies but what about everywhere else? Do you pay attention to what people say about you on the internet?
Googling your company name is a good start but will you remember to do it every day… five times a day and is it enough? Read my article Pssst … This Is What They Said About Your Brand! Why Your Online Reputation Is Important and find out what you should be doing to safeguard your brand name.
What Is Your Online Reputation?
Your online reputation is what people are saying about you… behind your back! Sure, the fans on your pages love you but what about everyone else? Today customers and potential customers are looking on blogs, forums, directories, and review sites to find out about your brand before they use you. If you have negative reviews, complaints, or speculative conversations surrounding your brand, then you may need to engage companies such as Reputation Defender to clean up your online reputation. Otherwise, you could end up losing potential clients without even knowing it!
Why Is It So Hard To Monitor?
Monitoring your online reputation is difficult because there are so many places you may have been mentioned, where do you begin? Additionally, as your brand grows, how can you possibly keep up with what people are saying? The other issue of course is how to respond when you do get mentioned and do you have the resources to do it? Online reputation is not just about your brand, it can be about you too so taking it seriously is important. That’s why monitoring your reputation is so important, and why many brands turn to an online reputation management agency.
Why Is It Important?
Monitoring your online reputation is a really important part of digital marketing because it can drastically affect how much business you get. While you are merrily placing adverts and attracting new clients, a negative post can do one hundred times more damage. Consider reading up online articles or look here to know more about how you could improve on your brand’s online reputation.
Online Reputation Facts
- 78% of customers trust peer recommendations over advertisements
- 65% of Internet users see online search as a trusted source of information about brands
- 8% of U.S. recruiters have rejected candidates based on information found online
- 16% of people will Google a potential partner before a first date
- 3 out of 5 people now research potential purchases on social media
How Do You Monitor Your Online Reputation?
If you want to be notified whenever someone mentions your brand then you can use media monitoring software. Here are some of my favourite free tools that do the job!
Google Alerts
Setup a basic Google Alert to get instant, daily or weekly notifications about your brand or any associated keyword. Just be prepared that you will probably get lots of emails that have nothing to do with you unless you are very specific or your brand name is unusual!
Image Raider
Is somebody using your copyrighted images? With Image Raider you can operate a reverse image search and see if people are stealing your images online.
Tweet Alarm
Create an automatic monitoring system using Tweet Alarm so that you can see who has mentioned you or any of your campaign hashtags on Twitter.
Pin Alerts
Want to know when someone mentions you on Pinterest or pins something from your website? You need Pin Alerts!
Social Mention
If you are a big brand then you need a big solution. Social Mention helps you to track mentions and analyse data including geographic data and gender demographics.
There are hundreds of great tools available for monitoring your online reputation and it depends how much you want to spend as to which you will choose. To begin with though, start with a few free tools so that at least you can keep on top of things and then you can always progress to something more sophisticated later.
I hope you enjoyed reading Pssst … This Is What They Said About Your Brand! Why Your Online Reputation Is Important.
What are your favourite media monitoring tools? Tweet me @charli_says and let me know.