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Do you know what people are saying about your business online? Are you tracking your online reputation and defending your brand? If not, you should be. It’s more important than ever to keep track of what’s being said about you online, and take steps to protect your image.
You’ve built a solid website for your business. Fantastic! It’s easy to think you have everything under control. An article here and there, a few posts on your social media profiles, and your online reputation will take care of itself.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Have you ever Googled yourself or your business? Many of us have, for sure. When you search for yourself, you might find another version of yourself as a copywriter in Upwork. This is more common than you think. When you search for your business, the results could be shocking.
While you may have control of your website and social media profiles, there’s a lot of other information you have no control over and haven’t contributed to. Business reviews, listings, and images of your company can pop up from nowhere.
And the potential for damage is daunting. Your online reputation could be at stake and it’s easy to feel you have no control over what’s being said and shared.
The Two Reasons You Need to be Tracking Your Online Reputation
With the amount of fake news and bad reviews around, your online reputation can change rapidly. So, here’s why you need to keep your online information and reputation in check.
1. Your Online Presence Is Everywhere
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor… the list is endless. There are many platforms online for you – and your customers – to find information about a business.
Blog posts and social media offer you a fantastic opportunity to share positive feedback with your audience. However, keeping track of customers’ comments, conversations, feelings, and thoughts about your company are daunting.
This means you need to join in the conversation. Respond to every comment professionally and positively. How you respond says so much about your business, and it shows customers that you care and value their feedback and experiences.
Responding to customer reviews is crucial because 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This means online reviews can make or break your company.
Responding to positive feedback or even negative comments will boost your engagement. And responding to negative feedback is an opportunity to fix situations that could spiral and damage your online reputation.
2. Claiming Back Your Listing Can Take Too Much Time
Yes, anyone can list your business online.
Also, just as you can buy your business domain and register your business on social media, anyone else can do exactly that too. And there’s nothing stopping someone from creating a website to dismantle your empire.
In a world full of catfishing, where people impersonate each other, it’s not unusual for businesses to become targets too. The great news is that if someone lists your business, you can take steps to regain control.
Google and Facebook are great at fixing this; however, the process isn’t instant. This is because you’ll have to show various forms of certification and verification to prove you’re the real owner. And during this time, you’ll have no control of your online reputation, sadly.
Three Tools That Can Help with Tracking your Online Reputation
As you can see, it’s essential to know how to track your online reputation. Here are three ways to do it.
1. Set Up Google Alerts
One way to monitor your online reputation is by setting up Google Alerts. This way, Google will notify you whenever someone publishes new content containing keywords that you select.
Also, you can set up alerts for your business’s name, your own name, and common misspellings of your business name.
Google Alerts will help you stay abreast of what’s being said about your company. Thus, you can catch and rectify negative reviews and engage back with positive recommendations.
You can also set up alerts for your competitors’ names, to keep tabs on their activity and what people are saying about them.
2. SentiOne
SentiOne helps to keep tabs on what your customers and others are saying about your business. With SentiOne, you’ll have access to both real-time and historical data — what people may have said about your business in the past before you started using SentiOne.
Using this tool, you can also track your business’s mentions, social profiles, and other keywords.
To avoid experiencing information overload (SentiOne searches thousands of web sources to find your brand’s mentions), filter what you’re monitoring.
Also, you can filter results into positive or negative feedback. This way you can address the negative mentions quickly to avoid a crisis.
3. Monitor Reviews Sites Using Review Push
With Review Push, you can monitor social media and popular review sites, especially if your business has multiple locations.
The best part is that you’ll get all the reviews from different review sites in one place. And, if you set up email alerts, you can respond to the reviews (whether positive or negative) directly from your inbox with Review Push.
Also, you can see review sites in your industry where your business isn’t listed yet. For multiple locations, you can get your reports via multi-level reporting. This enables you to get reports from regional, corporate or store levels.
Conclusion
It’s more important than ever to keep track of what’s being said about you online and take steps to protect your image.
The first step is finding out where people are talking about you. There are a number of tools that can help you do this, including Google Alerts and Social Mention.
Once you know where people are discussing your brand, it’s important to participate in the conversation. You don’t want customers or potential customers only seeing one side of the story. Defend your brand by participating in discussions and answering any questions that come up.
Finally, be proactive about monitoring your online reputation and addressing any negative sentiment before it has a chance to hurt your business.
Are you tracking your online reputation? And if so, what tools are you using?
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Great suggestions! Do you use both SentiOne and Review Push? Or is one better than the other?
I haven’t used either yet, I found them through social media examiner’s website, a great website by the way, where they have more information on them. I plan to use these when my business grows more and am making $5,000 or more a month. SentiOne seems better than ReviewPush and they have a messenger bot feature similar to ManyChat but is Quite expensive to use for a small business. ReviewPush is not as expensive as SentiOne and does have a 21-day free trial. Personally, I would try the free trial with ReviewPush, to try it out, and then cancel after 2 weeks with them. I have signed up to SentiOne but have not heard back from them, I’m guessing because my small business is still new and small for them to consider looking into any mentions of my business, it is also expensive to use per month. I think using either tool will be beneficial to catch any negative reviews right away, it’s better to find them right away before the person does more damage to you, I read about a few that experienced this, like Ruth Soukup’s experience.