Business reputation is something that you should consider more than anything else. It is that necessary little puzzle piece which will have a huge impact on a number of your customers and amount of your income. And it is not only your, let’s say, offline reputation. In the world of technology development, your online image should be carefully monitored as well. Your brand may get a great feedback and negative reviews and no one is impervious to it. If you can’t prevent some scenarios it is better to be prepared to face them.

So you have your brand and it can be mentioned in different sources, such as news, social media, forums, and sites that provide users with different reviews. Your task is to be aware of your online reputation and respond fast. This challenge may seem pretty impossible to complete but let us show you how easily and painlessly the brand monitoring can be made.Are there any benefits?

Actually, yes. First of all, you will know what people say about your business. Such mentions may build or destroy a brand. When you have this information you will be able to reach out to whoever made a mention to thank or apologize. Any reaction will mean that you care what people’s opinions are. Experts call it “the power of the Internet”.If you are not sure that monitoring of brand mentions is necessary, here are some advantages you may also get:

• Learn what your customer’s wishes are. When users leave a review they don’t only leave their opinion but also give useful tips on how the product or services can be improved. In this way, ignoring mentions means that you miss a chance to get valuable information.
• Engage with your customers. Today time is very expensive and not many of us want to spend it on phone or online survey. It is easier to complain on a social network’s feed or tag a company. That is why there is a need to reply to each mention your brand has – negative or positive. You’ll have a chance to boost online presence.
• Grow your online presence. The more it grows the more popular you become. The more popular you are, the more authority your company gets online. And, as you already know, authority means trust.
• Save on market research. The cheapest way to make a research is to look at your brand mentions. Find out what blogs are talking about you, who tweets about your company, what people like and dislike about your company. Do the same with your competitors, find out more about them to improve your business and be better than they are.

What tools to use to monitor mentions

The range of tools is quite wide but let’s take a look on those that really are worth noticing.

Google Alerts

This tool is considered to be one of the most powerful ones that will monitor your brand mentions. The algorithm of its work is pretty simple. All you need to do is log in to your account, then add keywords that you want mentions to be tracked for and receive notifications as soon as any mentions appear on the Web. The mentions can be found at the news, blogs, discussions and so on.

Of course, with Google Alerts you can add any keywords for tracking mentions, but to get an exact match it is much better to use that brand name which is associated with your company. Also, you can attach URLs of your website, your company’s CEO, contact details, etc.

Even though this tool has wide crawling possibilities (as well as Google itself), it is still pretty limited. There is a possibility that a user won’t be able to see mentions for a few days if he relies on data delivered by Google. Nevertheless, it is a perfect decision for those who has a small budget.

How to use Google Alerts

1Go to Google Alerts, enter a topic you want to follow.

2Customize options: frequency of notifications receiving, types of sites, language, a country you want to get info from, an amount of results, accounts for getting the alert.

3Click Create Alert.

4Get emails when the matching search results are found.

Social Mention

It is a free tool that provides a real-time online monitoring. It crawls not only social media but also blogs, images, and videos. For this, you need to specify the keywords.

This tool offers analytics that shows a different kind of mentions, top keywords, and sources, the number of those authors that are unique, and other important for any SEOs data. There is an option that allows downloading all the data in the CSV spreadsheet format.

The Social Mention has limits, though. You won’t be able to create an alert or see the difference between today and yesterday amounts of mentions. The only way to track this kind of data is to do it manually.

Hootsuite

As you may already know, Hootsuite has been positioned as a popular social media, where you are able to schedule and publish posts. But you should also know that this tool has wider possibilities. One of them gives an ability to add streams. So how does it look like? When you set up an account with your social media profiles for your business, you will be able to create “Streams”. With their help, any user can easily monitor different social networks.

You will be able to estimate such relevant to mentions data as:

• Twitter – mentions, inbox and outbox messages, likes, retweets.
• Facebook – mentions, messages.
• LinkedIn – discussions, updates.
• Instagram – customers, followers, competitors, industry terms, and photos tagged to locations.
• YouTube – comments.

This tool allows you to view and respond in real time to the mentions of your brand. It is very convenient because there is no need to leave the Hootsuite dashboard. After you log in, you will need to connect the social networks accounts.

Using the free account you will get 3 social profiles, basic analytics, ability to schedule posts and access to basic apps. Also, this plan includes 2 RSS feeds and SSL secure.

Talkwalker

The Talkwalker tool is a great alternative of Google Alerts. You can easily add your own brand name and find mentions if there are any. The additional information is also provided. You can choose result type, language, frequency of sending alerts, what kind of results you want to receive. To get results of monitoring, you should add your email.

Mention

This tool can take one of the first three prizes without any doubt. After you register in the system you will be able to set up an alert. For this, you pick the type that fits your goal of monitoring. It can be your company or product, your competitor or “anything else”. Enter the name of your brand or a rival, then choose the priority pages: a company website, Twitter profile, Facebook page, and other networks. After that, you select sources and languages of mentions. You can also use the advanced settings where an alert is customized by certain rules, including or excluding certain keywords.

HowSociable

With Howsociable marketers are able to monitor what people are saying about the brand and competitors. After the analysis is done a user will be able to compare received data points to make some changes to strategies to improve the results of promotional campaigns.

After you’ve entered your brand, you are able to estimate the data received from the social networks. Also, there will be such value as the magnitude score. This data is an indication of the level of activity around a brand. The information is provided per a week. The range is from 0 to 10. So if your brand gets zero it means your brand wasn’t popular. A score of 10 shows that the brand was on the top of social networks.

Hashtag Search Tools

Hashtags have enormous benefits when used appropriately in the social networks. Especially they are mostly used on Twitter and Facebook. Hashtags are used for drawing the attention, organization, and promotion.

Hashtags were firstly used on Twitter. In such way people could find information, news, follow interesting people or even start a conversation.

Now the popularity of #hashtags has increased. People use them to talk about brands. So in case you have missed a mention of your hashtag, it will not help you to look good in the eyes of your consumers.

The range of monitoring tools for hashtags is pretty wide.

One of the most informative instruments is #tagboard. It is very easily and intuitive to use this tool. All you have to do is to enter your brand name and the system will collect all the data in few seconds. With #tagboard you are able to track mentions on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Vine and Flickr.

Another tool that is worth of your attention is #RiteTag. It doesn’t only track your brand mentions but also optimizes updates for such social networks as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

RiteTag also has an extension that is available for adding to your web browser. This suitable thing will let you schedule updates with your optimized hashtags from anywhere.

Conclusion

If you care about your reputation you should definitely pay attention to what people say about you on the Web. And, as you can see, Googling your company name, product or service is not always enough. Manage your online reputation before you face the situation when your brand is in the list of companies which ignore their customers.
There are many tools that send notifications when something positive or negative comes up. Use instruments to be aware of what people talk about you and reply to them in time, no matter if it is positive or negative comments. Create a reputation of the company that cares about its customers and improve your online authority.