9 Tools For Small Business Reputation Management & Brand Monitoring
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For many small businesses, dealing with an online presence can be a bit daunting. It can take a lot of time to maintain a website and a presence on various social media platforms. Many small businesses find it hard to simply maintain a Facebook page or Twitter account, let alone do them well. As a result, many businesses turn their social media management over to hired guns, many of whom seem to simply do the bare minimum: a post here, a tweet there, and that’s that.

But one element of a strong social and online presence that’s often forgotten is that of brand monitoring and reputation management. It’s not enough to simply post on your favorite social channels from time to tie. You need to keep your ear to the ground and find out what people are saying, or not saying, about you and your competition.

Here are 9 free tools that I use regularly (some have premium versions) to make sure I know what customers and others are saying about our business, allowing us to respond properly, while also learning where we can improve.

1. GOOGLE ALERTS

This is the granddaddy of all brand monitoring tools, but it’s important to set up these free Google Alerts so that you get an email notification any time someone mentions your business or something related to your business. Not foolproof, but a good starter. You can get them anytime Google finds a mention, or set it for reports once a day or once a week. I prefer the “as it happens” feature so that I can make sure I have the ability to respond in a timely fashion if need be. It might be a good idea to monitor common misspellings of your business name or your own name, as well.

2. TALKWALKER ALERTS

A few years ago there was talk of Google shutting down the Alerts product, and a lot of folks turned to Talkwalker Alerts. I’ve found that Talkwalker often finds more mentions than Google, so that’s a good thing. I use both, so quite often I’m getting some redundancies, but it’s worth it to make sure I’m covered. These two tools do a great job of any mentions on blogs as well as in news stories.

3. REPUTOLOGY

Reputology might be my favorite of the bunch because it specifically searches for mentions on review sites like Yelp, Foursquare, Google My Business, and other sites where customers have the chance to leave reviews. For some reason, neither Google nor Talkwalker alerts scour these sites. This is one where I use the free version, but a more robust premium version is available. As it turns out, while I was writing this blog post, two notifications came in: one for a good review, and one for a less than stellar review.

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This allows me to easily pass these reviews along to my coworkers, as well as to respond properly to the reviewer. We take negative reviews seriously, and want to use them as learning experiences. The notifications give me links so I can see the actual reviews where they are, or I can use the Reputology Dashboard to see them all together, regardless of which site they are on. This allows me to get a nice snapshot of how we’re doing. The dashboard also provides some analytics so you can measure your online reputation.

4. MENTION

Another free tool that offers a premium version, Mention does a great job of scouring the social web for mentions of your business. The biggest problem with the free version is that you are limited to getting only a certain number of notifications. I find that I run out of notifications each month because of how thorough it is, so have toyed with paying for the premium version.

5. SOCIAL MENTION

Social Mention is another free tool that combs through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social sites for business mentions. Plug in your name and set it up as an alert and you’ll start seeing how and when you’re mentioned. As an added feature, the tool also includes a sentiment analysis gauge so you can see if your mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. That said, I’ve found that like most sentiment analysis tools, that aspect of the tool isn’t very good, often marking positive mentions as either neutral or negative. There is also a keyword feature so that you can tell which aspect of your business gets the most conversation going.

6. PLATFORM SPECIFIC ALERTS

Less a tool than it is a setting, most platforms from Facebook business pages to Twitter and Google + will allow you to get some sort of notification, either through email or a smart phone app alert, when there has been activity on your pages, or if someone has tagged you. I rely on the smart phone alerts so that I can quickly check these mentions and respond, if need be. With very little intrusion, this can make your business look as if you are active online 24/7, which can impress your customers. When I respond to tweets or comments in the evening or on weekends, people are often pleasantly surprised.

And yes, I confess that I even responded to a tweet during my son’s wedding reception last week. It took all of 1o-seconds, and no one was all the wiser, since we were all using our smart phones to take pictures and videos of the reception anyway. I guess this makes me a bad dad, eh?

7. HOOTSUITE

While Hootsuite is primarily a tool for social management and engagement, it’s notifications of mentions on Twitter, Facebook, and more is really helpful. You can even set up a stream/column that searches specifically for your business name (or anything else related to you) apart form actual “@-mentions” on Twitter. And you can respond to mentions from right there in the Hootsuite app or dashboard. Again, I use the free version even though there is a nice paid-version available.

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