It takes attention to detail and a great deal of patience to build a favorable online reputation. Conversely, it takes a lot less for it to be broken.
The importance of constant online reputation monitoring cannot be overstated. One crack in your online reputation is enough to wreak havoc on your business, which is why it is essential to ensure an internet presence free of reputation damages.
In this article, we will discuss why reputation management and monitoring matters, how to perform it efficiently and what tools to use.
Table of Contents
What Is Online Reputation Monitoring?
Online reputation refers to how a business is perceived by consumers and prospects on the internet. Online reputation monitoring is a series of steps for keeping track of your brand’s repute and status in a digital world.
A brand’s business reputation is reflected in the reviews people leave on websites and the comments they share online.
As online reputation can make or break a company, both online and offline, business managers and decision-makers must be aware of the opportunities a positive review can bring, but also the damage a negative perception of a brand can do.
This is what online review monitoring is in a nutshell – keeping track of what users say about a business, its products and services, so that managers can amend the effect of negative reviews or keep the flow of positive opinions.
Online Reputation Monitoring and Online Reputation Management Difference
Both online reputation monitoring and online reputation management have the purpose of ensuring a brand reputation stays positive among internet users consisting of existing and prospective customers.
Online reputation monitoring precedes online reputation management in that it evaluates the situation regarding a brand’s reputation, allowing business decision-makers to decide on the steps that need to be taken. Monitoring keeps the company’s eyes open on everything brand-related on the internet, from their social media accounts to reviews on independent websites and other brand mentions.
Online reputation management comes as a result of reputation monitoring. It encompasses actionable methods and steps for managing, improving and maintaining the company’s online reputation.
How to Perform Online Brand Reputation Monitoring?
The two main sources of brand listening, where your prospective and existing customers discuss your brand are social media and third-party review pages, like Google Reviews, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, Amazon and others.
1. Keep an Eye on Your Social Media Pages
Your social media pages – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others — that you may use depending on your needs should be well-maintained and regularly updated with new content to entice user engagement and influx of comments.
This environment is your primary source of knowledge on what people are saying about your company. If they complain about a product or a service in the comments, to other commenters or their friends, make sure your online reputation manager takes note of the nature of their dissatisfaction.
Positive comments should not be ignored as well. Knowing what your customers like about your brand is a good directive for your business. These commenters should also be acknowledged in the subsequent online reputation management steps.
2. Look at Review Websites
Monitoring as many business review sites and forums – including those where you didn’t add your company because users can do it themselves – is essential to know how the users who may not be your immediate social media followers feel about your brand.
Keeping tab of negative comments and the users’ exact complaints can help you narrow down the department in which your company is lacking (in the eyes of the consumers). Knowing this will help you come up with an improvement strategy in that field as well as provide a blueprint to address these negative comments.
3. Use Online Monitoring Tools
Online reputation monitoring tools can help you stay on top of what your customers are saying about your company online. These tools crawl the most (and less) common websites where communities discuss brands and look for the mentions of your company.
They gather reviews, social media posts, tweets and other published, user-generated content on your business. Besides collecting these, their AI-based language processing mechanism can also rank them and evaluate them based on positive and negative sentiment.
5 Best Business Reputation Monitoring Tools
There are numerous reputation management tools on the market, but these five stand out with the scope of their features and usability.
- Google Alerts: This tool helps you learn about all of your brand mentions by crawling and collecting blog posts and news articles where your company appears, as well as the comments section on these pages.
- Social Mention: This free tool crawls the internet for social mentions of all kinds – showing where mentions are coming from, even for your business’s competitors.
- Brandseye: Brandseye provides a wide array of brand reputation management tools. The multitude of benefits come with a price, so it may be more suitable for established companies that are not on a tight budget.
- SentiOne: Providing access to both real-time and historical data, this tool tracks mentions of your brand’s social profiles or keywords. It scouts thousands of internet sources, letting you filter the keywords you want to track. SentiOne makes information easier to manage by providing data visualizations and aggregations.
- Reputology: This review management platform is suitable for multi-location businesses as it lets them get in on what the customers say about them on industry-specific review sites in various niches. It allows creation of customer service tickets to facilitate dealing with negative reviews.
Why Reputation Management Monitoring Matters?
Having a good (and early) overview of complaints and negative reviews your customers publish online lets you immediately attend to the issue, before the reviews cause damage to your reputation, operations and the way others see your company.
Online reputation monitoring is beneficial for businesses of all sizes and in all industries, from small to medium-sized businesses to large enterprises.
Credibility Boost
User reviews increase brand credibility, because having reviews of your products or services means that people are buying and evaluating them. And having a functional strategy for getting a lot of reviews increases the potential buyers’ confidence and trust in your brand.
Bear in mind that customers are more easily enticed to write and publish a negative review than a positive one. This is what makes reputation monitoring important, as detecting them as early as possible allows you to attend to them fast.
Better SEO Ranking
By keeping your online reputation in check, you stand a better chance of ranking highly in search engine results. Google’s algorithm favors websites with expertise, trustworthiness and authoritativeness —factors that determine page rankings.
The world’s biggest search engine also recognizes websites where users talk about your business and leave reviews. Making sure you get a lot of reviews, addressing the negative ones and turning them into positives can, therefore, work magic for your ranking prospects.
Improved Customer Experience
Customers are likely to spend more money with the company that provides great service. Therefore, making their user experience better is as important as converting your prospects into customers.
The very purpose of a review is to get an insight into how you can improve their experience and make them satisfied. Getting more reviews and responding to them promptly will provide you with more information on how you can improve their UX.
Sales Boost
9 out of 10 consumers read reviews before buying a product or signing up for a service. Since reviews are a major factor that most consumers consider, it’s obvious they play a big role in your business’s success.
Reviews increase trust for potential future customers. A brand that customers trust has a loyal following that advocates for the brand, resulting in new customers and repeat sales.
Getting Business Insights
Looking at your customers’ comments and reviews about your brand can put you in a position to adapt to the changing business landscape quickly and efficiently.
Getting the insights about your business straight from the source provides insight on how you can improve and what you should do more of in order to achieve the greatest level of customer satisfaction.
Online Reputation Monitoring Takeaways
Online reputation monitoring is the essential first step in maintaining a positive brand image and addressing negative feedback from your existing customers.
Instating an effective brand reputation management strategy begins with a clear outlook and insight into your online presence and brand mentions. This overview allows you to timely and strategically engage in a conversation with your demographics, turning your reputation towards the positive through meaningful and relevant messaging.
Online reputation monitoring thrives on these three pillars:
- Keeping an eye on your social media pages
- Looking at business review websites
- Using appropriate social listening tools that help you scour both for brand mentions
Monitoring your brand presence and digital reputation matters, because it contributes to better credibility and search engine ranking, improved customer experience, boost in sales and more accurate insights about the users’ perception of your business.
Outsourcing the services of some of the reputation management agencies and specialized public relation companies can help you with this.
