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One huge change from the pre-internet age is the vast quantity of information about you that is publicly accessible. Once something goes online, it is usually there forever. This makes it vital that you keep track of your online reputation and do what you can to minimize any harmful statements about you or your business. There are quite a few online reputation tools you can use to help you both understand your reputation and then to improve it, and minimize the dangers of more harmful references.
Online reputation management is the process you need to go through when you highlight positive items about you online, de-emphasize negative sentiment about you on the internet.
In some cases, online reputation management can take a considerable amount of effort. Luckily, there is a range of paid and free tools that can make your efforts easier.
The practices of online reputation management are the same, whether you are looking at your own name online, or whether you are focusing on your business reputation. As we recently discussed, personal branding is just as important online as corporate branding. Potential employers Google job candidates’ names to see what the internet can tell them. And you might have parts of your past you would prefer to disappear. Even your social accounts may be a problem, particularly if you treated them too “socially” in your youth.
Online Reputation Management Tools:
1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
Although we classify Brandwatch as a social media marketing platform, it is, in reality, much more. It solves critical problems for brands who want to lead on social media. This includes keeping track of your firm’s reputation online, along with strategies to deal with any issues.
It features a customizable, intuitive interface. Brandwatch’s search, filtering, labeling, and tracking capabilities are also a highlight.
Although Brandwatch includes modules on publishing, engaging, advertising, audience analytics, measuring, and benchmarking, its social listening capabilities will be of most interest to firms wanting to work on their online reputation management. Brandwatch’s Listen module is powered by Brandwatch and monitors brands across 100 million online sources. You can use it to spot emerging trends and find meaning in the conversations happening online.
Listen lets you discover trends of what people are saying about your brand, products, and competitors in real-time so that you can react faster. You can also monitor mentions to understand what makes your customers tick and what content resonates with them. Analyze sentiment and brand perception without the clunkiness of having to sift through large datasets manually.
Listen uses AI to detect spikes and drops in your data, making you aware of unusual activity. In addition, it automatically pings you when it observes negative comments so your team can act swiftly in case of an emerging crisis.
The Listen module links up with Brandwatch’s unified social inbox, which you can customize as you wish. Analyze, monitor, and act based on what you hear on social and via forums, review sites, and beyond.
2. Digimind – An Onclusive Company
Digimind is a powerful online reputation management tool that offers a host of features to help brands get to the bottom of what’s happening around its online reputation and offerings. While it offers impressive functionality, it’s still intuitive. Powered by AI, it’s trusted by big names like Lexus Asia Pacific and Renault.
You can use it to track competitor brands and products as well as listen to the conversation about your own brand and products on social networks. Its metrics are equally impressive. You can take advantage of deep analysis to reach actionable insights.
One of its features that deserve a special mention is its proprietary Natural Language Processing that can even process slang. With all this information at your fingertips, you’re perfectly positioned to identify and anticipate potential issues and adapt your brand strategy. In short, it’s more than managing your online reputation, it’s about being proactive and staying one step ahead.
It uses customized pricing, and packages can vary from per seat to volume-based packages. Digimind offers demos on request.
3. Brand24
With Brand24, you create Projects. Each Project tracks the social mentions of an entity. At higher levels, you can have multiple Projects, following more than one brand, or even specific campaigns of one brand.
You can search for things by either just typing in a list of keywords, or by specifying keywords to include and others to exclude, to make sure you’re not pulling in mentions that weren’t what you were looking for.
Brand24 doesn’t just pull in mentions from social media. It crawls through the entire web looking for every occurrence of your non-excluded keywords. It collects in real time all publicly available mentions from socials, news sites, videos, blogs, websites, discussion forums, google reviews and other sources.
Brand24 gives multiple ways you can filter your data. You can drill down to any day, week, or month. You can filter by source as well as by other criteria to help pinpoint who your most significant (and most influential) champions are. You can even filter by sentiment to see who’s been trash-talking you. In addition, you can easily analyze the data with a data-packed report.
Brand24’s comparison tool lets you compare the results of all your projects side by side.
4. Birdeye
Birdeye stands out in the realm of online reputation management, tailored to address the complexities of the digital world. Its robust suite underscores the criticality of reviews in shaping a brand’s online image. By enabling comprehensive review monitoring across diverse platforms, it empowers businesses to manage, respond to, and even market their feedback.
Crucial to its toolkit is its adeptness at social monitoring, ensuring brands remain engaged and informed of conversations on various social platforms. With Birdeye, integration is seamless; it links effortlessly with CRMs, review sites, and social channels, all while delivering granular insights through its sophisticated reporting mechanisms.
Prioritizing adaptability, Birdeye is built to cater to both small businesses and larger enterprises, guaranteeing swift alerts for immediate reputation management actions. It doesn’t merely offer tools; it equips brands to proactively shape and maintain a pristine online reputation.
5. YouScan
At its most basic, YouScan is a listening tool, able to scan social media and the rest of the web for brand mentions, and then analyze those mentions for its broader social impact. It finds billions of data points you can sift through, along with a host of ways to analyze that data. Its real gem is its image recognition features, which allows users to get remarkably specific in their visual searches.
You begin by setting up Boolean searches to find the data you require. Once YouScan”s identified some data that meets your search criteria, you can go to a page that shows you all the mentions the platform has collected that matches that criteria. You can filter the results down in multiple ways to get only what’s relevant to your search. With Visual Insights, you can get really specific in searching through all the images that come up — an incredibly accurate AI engine powers the image recognition.
The analytics tools include interactive graphs and charts depicting all the major trends happening with your topics of choice. You can click anywhere on the charts to drill down and see the posts behind the numbers.
6. BrandMentions
BrandMentions doesn’t limit its listening to a few channels. Every major social media platform is represented here, along with non-social websites, such as news, blog, and review sites.
You go through an extensive configuration, first identifying the keywords you’re tracking—most often your company name and/or social handle. You can also monitor your competitors’ keywords and social handles. You can set your Project up by requiring or excluding specific keywords to appear in your results. The platform displays sentiment analysis for each mention, and you can filter your results accordingly.
After you’ve created your project, it takes less than a minute before you can look at a breakdown of your mentions. You can filter the results in many ways, and you can select any specific mention for a more in-depth view. With social posts, you can respond directly from BrandMention’s interface.
As you continue to use BrandMentions, the pool of data will continue to grow.
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo takes a somewhat different take on things compared to the other tools in this list. It allows you to comb the web for any content that includes your search term. Its key distinction though, is including the amount of engagement associated with each search result.
You can perform searches using the following filters:
- Date
- B2B Publishers
- Country
- Language
- Domain
- Content-type
- Word count
- Publisher size
BuzzSumo provides engagement figures for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It provides a total number of links each search result has received.
BuzzSumo provides a content analysis report. This show detailed graphs predominantly relating to engagement on articles about your topic of choice.
Perhaps most importantly for online reputation management, you can create alerts in BuzzSumo to track:
- Brand mentions
- Competitor mentions
- Content from a website
- Keyword mentions
- Backlinks
- An author
You can set inclusions and exclusions, a minimum engagement value that must be satisfied before you receive an alert, and whether to receive alerts instantly, daily or not at all.
8. Mention
Mention allows brands to monitor social media and find any mentions of themselves in online conversations. You can easily monitor over 1 billion sources daily, including social media, forums, blogs, and the rest of the web. As with some of the other products here, you can use Boolean alerts to help you zero in on your brand, competitors, and customers for precise market research.
Mention’s media monitoring and social listening make crisis management moments easier to deal with. You can set up pulse alerts to tell you when your brand name fires. It makes it much easier for you to react appropriately to either good or bad news. Indeed, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram integrations, you can respond directly on your social media accounts.
Mention tracks brand awareness, sentiment, and the reputation of your brand or your competitors. The sentiment analysis tools help you quickly sort positive comments from the negative, so you can quickly identify any problem.
9. Your Web Browser
If you are actively wanting to improve your online management, then the first tool of defense is your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari or whatever you prefer). Type in your name and look at the first few pages of the search results. The first page is the most important, though, as few people click through to the second or subsequent pages in a search.
It might be best if you carry out an incognito search, as sometimes the browsers have a habit of customizing your searches, which would give an untrue set of results for your name. It is essential that you don’t do a Google search while you are signed in as yourself or your company.
Look at each result, and first decide whether the result references you or not. Split every result into one of the following categories:
- Negative – the result is about you and does not show you in a positive light. Naturally, any court reports and media reports on crimes will appear here, but there are many other types of negative search results. They could be rants from your ex-partners. There could be negative social comments from unhappy customers. They may be a “mistake” from your past – the tagged Facebook photo of you streaking in your university days, or lying comatose with penises drawn on you after a youthful drinking binge. They might even be a false and nasty allegation from somebody you have upset.
- Neutral – results that neither hurt nor help your reputation. They might be your position in a school athletics race, a review of a football game you once played, or a reference to you being a member of a local club.
- About somebody else – if you are searching for your personal name there is a high likelihood that you will encounter results for people who have the same name as you. This is less likely for a business, but there will still be cases for firms with more generic names. For example, if US web developer Castle was to Google their name, they will find that their search results would be dominated by references to the Castle television show
- Positive and helpful – hopefully, you will see positive content that shows you in a good light
Don’t be too upset if the Number 1 result in Google isn’t about you. Only 50% of people can claim ownership of the first result for their name. Indeed, only 2% of people can claim all the items on the first page of the search results.
10. Google Alerts
The internet is always changing. That means that somebody might post something that references you any day. You can set up a Google Alert for your name (either your personal name or your business).
Google will alert you with an email when it picks up a new mention of your name. This will make it easier for you to take action, should it not be complimentary.
11. The Brand Grader
If you are checking out your business reputation, then The Brand Grader can provide you with useful information about how your brand performs online.
It is free and straightforward to use. All you have to do is to enter the name of your brand and provide an email account.
The Brand Grader sends you a report on your company. It provides a quick overview of the brand’s online presence. The report includes details from the last seven days relating to:
- Your biggest web influencers – blogs and news sites who have talked about you
- Your top sources – the web and social sources who mentioned your brand most
- Sentiment detection – whether most of your mentions are positive or negative
- Mentions overview – how many mentions your brand received on websites, blogs, and forums
- Mention Locations – where conversations about your brand came from
- Social Following – your follower count on different social media platforms
12. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides a comprehensive analysis for any website or app. It gives you are a wealth of insights about your site – the main client face for most businesses.
It also provides you with information about your competitors’ sites. This gives you an easy way to compare your website with your competitors. It shows you insights into your industry, and these provide an indication of how well your brand is respected within your niche.
13. Socialmention.net
Socialmention.net monitors the web and picks up real-time social media search and analysis. You enter your brand name, select from Blogs, Microblogs, Bookmarks, Images, Videos, Questions, or All, and then press Search.
It brings up your mentions from the last day, with a guide to the sentiment of each mention. It also summarises the sentiment into positive, negative, and neutral mentions, as well as lists your top keywords, hashtags, users, and sources.
Socialmention.net gives overall stats about you, with scores for strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.
14. Review Push
You can use Review Push to collect all your online reviews in one place. It offers multi-site monitoring and unlimited locations. This makes it particularly useful for firms with branches in different areas.
Also useful for multi-site businesses is the ability to compare how your stores rank against each other.
Whenever your business receives a new review, Review Push notifies you via email. The email gives you the option to respond to your online reviews.
15. Reputology
Reputology is a review monitoring and management platform that helps businesses monitor, respond to, and analyze online reviews.
It is a tool which both allows you to find reviews of your business and then respond in an appropriate way to any negative sentiment your find.
This is especially useful for businesses that rely on online reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and other major review sites.
Reputology is location specific, which is particularly important for firms who sell to a local market.
You can use Reputology to track reviews written about your locations, products, and services.
But Reputology offers more than just the chance to collect all of your reviews on one dashboard. It sends you automated email notifications of new reviews, and you can reply directly from the platform.
It provides semantic analysis to convert the unstructured content from reviews into actionable data.
Reputology even gives you a decision tree to help guide you through the common scenarios for handling a negative review.
It provides the tools to help you track how your team has followed up on and responded to reviews.
16. GatherUp
Any business that sells knows the value of five-star reviews. The more five-star reviews you have, the more trustworthy you look to potential customers.
That is all very well, but it can be challenging to encourage customers to leave reviews – no matter how excellent your service is.
Good businesses find it even harder to get reviews than lousy companies do. People are far more inclined to go online and complain than they are to compliment.
GatherUp used to blatantly go by the name GetFiveStars. The new name sound more ethical.
GatherUp helps you build a continuous cycle of customer feedback and reviews that you can use to convert more customers. It allows you to engage with your customers via email or text, requesting them to make a review of your product.
GatherUp also monitors over 30 reviews sites like Google, Facebook, Trip Advisor, and the BBB. It captures a Net Promoter Score, survey questions, and customer feedback. It emails you when you have new feedback.
17. Reputation
Reputation is an Online Reputation Management (ORM) tool, designed more for large businesses and enterprises. They help large enterprises monitor, manage, and maximize their online reputation through a comprehensive suite of solutions.
Their services include:
- Online reviews – soliciting feedback from local customers
- Surveys – collecting in-depth customer feedback
- Social suite – allows firms to engage with their community, building their reputation and motivating purchase decisions
- Business listing – helping enterprises optimize their listing, making it easier for customers to find them
- Making sense of data collected, identify emerging issues, strengths, and weaknesses, and making targeted operational improvements that drive positive reviews
- Reputation Live – enabling frontline sales reps at your locations to request online reviews on their mobile devices, immediately following customer interactions.
18. BrandYourself
BrandYourself is online reputation management software for individuals and businesses. BrandYourself builds a free reputation report so you can see how you look online. It calculates your score, which will put you somewhere at a level between Very Poor and Excellent.
Your report explains to you how you can improve your Reputation Score. It also highlights your risk factors – flagged social results, flagged social posts, and flagged images. It also looks at your personal brand and the properties that affect that.
You can work through an action plan to improve your scores.
You are given the option to improve your results yourself or to pay BrandYourself to do the necessary changes for you. You only have access to limited data with the free report, however.
BrandYourself uses a 4-step suppression process when they try to improve your online reputation:
- Remove any Google results that can be taken down (this is relatively rare)
- Build an impressive online presence to suppress your negative results in Google
- Continually create positive content to protect your good name from any future damage
- Monitor your online presence and ensure it’s maximizing your career opportunities
Just be aware that it can be costly to work with a branding expert – plans start at $399 a month.
19. SentiOne
Founded in 2011, SentiOne uses AI technology to help brands with customer service automation. It basically has two main platforms: Listen and Automate.
With the Listen platform, you can keep track of online conversations that are important to your brand helping you to take control of your brand’s online image. Trusted by brands like Nivea, you can use it to collect opinions from millions of sources, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, blogs, Google Reviews, and TripAdvisor.
It also has AI-based anomaly detection and notifications that can help you to avoid social media crises. If there’s an unusual spike in online discussions that can point to a potential problem, you’ll get notified automatically so that you can try to resolve the issue before it turns into something bigger. You can then participate in online discussions via their all-in-one customer service tool or use sophisticated conversational AI voicebots that are part of its Automate platform.
For the social listening platform, pricing starts at $300 per month.
20. Meltwater
Founded in 2001, Meltwater was the world’s first online media monitoring tool. Fast-forward two decades and today they’re viewed as one of the top brand monitoring tools that can help you to manage your online reputation.
In short, Meltwater lets you monitor mentions of your brand, its campaigns (including linked hashtags), and executive team in real time across social media and news sites. When there’s a crisis, you’ll receive real-time notifications empowering you to respond as fast as possible to the situation.
Not only does it help you to avert a crisis by directly responding to online messages or comments promptly, but it also helps you to get a better picture of your online rep as you can identify the audience with whom you’ve currently found favor (or lost it). This demographic segmentation can help you to profile your audience better and improve your future campaigns.
21. PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is one of the top insight-driven marketing platforms. It makes it easier for users to manage their marketing and win local customers. With regards to online reputation management specifically, it can help you with various tasks.
From its unified dashboard, you can get a quick overview of ratings, reviews and feedback across more than 100 sites including Google, Facebook, and Yelp. It also streamlines messaging. You can use it to respond to direct messages and comments shared on the main social media channels via one dashboard. This means that you can resolve issues faster, helping to show that you’re indeed a reputable brand. If you’re working as part of a bigger team, you can also create a review monitoring workflow so that your team members can keep track of reviews that relate to their location.
22. Talkwalker Analytics
Included in Talkwalker’s list of features that can help a lot with online reputation management are a free Social Search and Talkwalker Alerts. With Social Search, you can keep track of your social media platforms in real time and keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand across all the main social media channels over a period of a week.
Then, there’s Talkwalker Alerts which is a great alternative to Google Alerts. It’s a free monitoring and management tool that will inform you when one of your keywords is used online. Popular keywords that you can use to monitor your reputation are your brand name, name of your CEO, or product names.
It also includes a video analytics tool that deserves special mention. With the help of its image recognition feature, you can control brand mentions (like your logo) in images and video too. In fact, according to their website, this tech can help you to find up to three times more brand mentions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a reputation management tool?
Reputation management software tools will assist your business in monitoring the web with reviews, brand awareness, and articles, among others. Your online image is so important, and reputation management software will help you maintain a strong and positive online perception.
What is the best reputation management software?
The best reputation management software for 2024 includes:
- Brandwatch (Formerly Falcon.io)
- Digimind
- Brand24
- YouScan
- BrandMentions
- BuzzSumo
- Mention
- Your Web Browser
- Google Alerts
- The Brand Grader
What is online reputation management tool?
Online reputation management tools are digital platforms that people can use to monitor what is being said about their brand. Online reputation management tools include monitoring through customer review portals, social networks, and online maps, among others.
What is an example of reputation management?
Reputation management PR will often include handling negative articles about a brand, responding to customer reviews, and influencer marketing to build positive brand awareness. Corporate brand management, reputation PR and communication.
