The key to every successful business hinges on how well the reputation of any given brand is upheld.
How are people perceiving your site or brand? What are people saying? Believe it or not, everything that is said online about your brand DOES matter. You need to know what people are saying, and where they are saying it: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good ol’ “I don’t care what other people think/say!” mentality can hurt your business FAST! Especially the say part. This mentality is one business-minded individuals should make a conscious effort to lose, and they should lose it quickly.
Since we’re very careful about our image at CrakRevenue, we’re going to share with you some of the most useful tools we use to manage our online reputation like a boss.
And - by the way - all these tools are free, so you have no excuse not to begin using them as soon as you’re done reading this blog post.
On the world wide web
Google Alerts
Probably the most known of the bunch, Google Alerts is a free service even celebrities admit to using. Celebrity or not, this is a cardinal tool you cannot afford to live without if you have a brand to protect.
Receive notifications to your inbox any time Google finds new results based on keywords you select — for blog posts, online articles, or any web-page — that can be crawled by Google.
Talkwalker Alerts
In much the same style as the aforementioned search engine giant’s notification system, Talkwalker Alerts is the sometimes more effective version of Google Alerts.
Same deal, same story. With Talkwalker Alerts - you also receive notification via e-mail or RSS feed any time that chosen “keyword” of yours is mentioned on the Interweb. And, of course, you get to view the webpage your keyword was mentioned on.
You decide how closely you want to keep an eye on things…
- You can receive e-mail alerts once a day or once a week.
- All results, or only the best results?
- Result type? News only, Blogs only, Discussions only... or, Every result?
There’s some debate as to which Alert system actually works better. Some say Google, some say Talkwalker. We won’t get into that today. It really depends though on how you’re using these two tools and how you’re classifying its success (exact keyword phrase, or partial mention? Relevant link, or useless?)
The solution?
Use both in combination to monitor mentions of your brand across the web. Why not?! They’re both free!
Google Trends
Stay hip.
Google Trends allows you to stay up-to-date on all the hottest search terms and trending topics on the web.
It offers business-minded people a pretty nifty visualization of all the latest popular searches. You can even add and explore trends by adding and comparing various search topics side by side to see which keyword, phrase, or brand crushes the others in terms of popularity.
Google's behind the scenes algorithms examine how often a specific search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various different regions of the world.
Social media specific
The number of tools and platforms available to monitor a brand's e-reputation on social media is countless, with new ones being launched each and every day.
While an exhaustive overview of all of them is nearly impossible, here are a few social-media-specific ones that we think you should be aware of:
Social Mention
Social Mention can be thought of as a "search engine" designed for social media. The way the platform works is, Social Mention scours the web for user-generated content (blogs, comments, reddit, twitter, photobucket, etc.).
It aggregates all this content and compiles it into a single stream of information.
Social mention allows you to view the strength, sentiment, passion, and the reach of the keywords you search
- Strength - the likelihood that your brand is being discussed on social media. (the formula: phrase mentions within the last 24hrs [divided by] total possible mentions.)
- Sentiment - the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative
- Passion - the measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly.
- Reach - it's the measure of the range of influence.
(the formula: the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions.)
However, as we mentioned, there are just too many tools to cover. There's quite a few other similar "instant" insight tools on the market to help you gauge your social media presence: Ice Rocket and Addictomatic are two additional ones worth checking out.
Control your Reputation Like a Boss
For one to succeed in reputation management, one must first recognize and understand that all postings about your business have a profound effect. Public opinion/commentary carries a lot of weight, especially in this information age. Once something is written online, it can be out there for everyone to find, and it can certainly influence public opinion. That’s why the tools we covered today are a necessary resource to turn to in the event of your brand being discussed online.
We recommend you use them!
