5 Great Tools to Help You Monitor Your Online Reputation
Do you know what people have been saying about you and your business online?
As a small business owner, you know that reputation is everything. Reviews are one of the first things a potential customer will look at when deciding whether they want to do business with you. Positive reviews will help foster trust and generate new business, which is what you want! But of course, there’s the flip side – a pattern of negative reviews will end up driving people away.
This is why staying on top of your online reputation is essential. But who has time to create and manage profiles across the MANY review sites out there? It can feel a bit overwhelming.
Don’t sweat it, though! Here are some great tools to help you monitor your business’ online reputation.
Google Alerts
When in doubt, turn to Google. With Google Alerts, all you have to do is type in your business’ name and wait for the alerts to come in. Google will scour the web for any mentions of your business and send the results right to your inbox. If you want to be super thorough, you can create additional alerts for all your brand keywords and product names.
Cost: Free
Social Mention
Consumers love to share their sentiments on social media. Whether they love your business or hate it, this is where they’ll go to spread the word. Social Mention is a search engine that monitors 80+ social media sites –– Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. –– to help you track who is talking about your business and what they’re saying. The results gauge:
- Strength: How likely it is that your business will be talked about on social media
- Sentiment: The ratio of positive to negative mentions
- Passion: How likely it is that the people talking about your business will continue to talk about it
- Reach: The total number of unique consumers who mention your business
Cost: Free
ReviewTrackers
It can be cumbersome to log-in and check on your latest reviews when you’re getting feedback on 10+ platforms. Luckily, there is ReviewTrackers, which brings all of your business’ reviews into one dashboard. It will even send you email reports to keep you up to speed and has great reporting features to help you track any patterns in customers’ feedback.
Cost: $49/month
Complaint Search Box
Just because you don’t see a complaint, doesn’t mean it’s not there. This nifty web tool will help you find them. The Complaint Search Box can search more than 40 complaint websites all at once. It’s quick, easy and, best of all, free. If someone has had a negative experience with your business and aired it out online, there’s a good chance Complaint Search Box will find it.
Cost: Free
Review Push
Review Push is a great all-in-one tool. First, it monitors the most popular review sites, such as Facebook, Google, Foursquare, etc. Anytime your business gets a new review on one of these sites, Review Push will notify you by email. It also allows you to respond to the review, which is pretty handy. And to top it all off, Review Push can help you generate new reviews by sending requests out to your customers. It’s a win-win-win!
Cost: $10/month
For more tips on reputation management, check out some of our other blog posts:
- Creative Ways to Get New Reviews for Your Small Business
- How Your Small Business Should Respond to Negative Online Reviews
Hope these resources help! If you have any favorites we haven’t mentioned here, make sure and let us know.