Seven Reputation Management Tools for Small Business Enterprises

Seven Tools for Small Businesses for Managing Online Brand Reputation

When it comes to maintaining an online presence, it can be a bit daunting, especially for small and medium business enterprises. It can take a lot of time to maintain a website and visible presence on various social media channels. There are small businesses which find it hard to simply maintain a Twitter or Facebook page, to be active all times. As a result, they hire staff and assign the task of maintaining social media management to them. But in reality, most of the hired staff simply does menial tasks such as post here, tweet there and that’s that.

According to experts, brand monitoring and reputation management is one such element that is often forgotten by most businesses and marketers. Simply posting content on popular social media channels is not enough to keep your brand alive online, instead you need to find out what people is saying, or not saying, about you and your competitors. Here are seven tools that most ORM experts use regularly and are highly effective in knowing what your customers and others saying about your brand.

• Google Alerts – When you are focusing your ORM efforts on Google search then you cannot ignore Google Alerts as it is considered as the leader of all brand monitoring tools. You need to set up a Google Alerts account so that you will receive an email any time when someone mentions your brand or something related to your brand. Even though it is totally foolproof, it can be a good starter for small business. You can get the email alerts anytime when Google finds a mention, or set it for reports once a day or once a week. Also, using Google Alerts you can monitor common misspellings of your brand name or your own name, as well. 

• Talkwalker Alerts – Few years ago, Talkwalker Alerts became a popular brand monitoring tool when there was a rumor going around in the marketing industry about Google shutting down its Google Alerts product, and a lot of people embraced Talkwalker Alerts as their primary ORM tool. It is being found that Talkwalker get more mentions than Google, and it can be considered as a good thing. You can use Talkwalker Alerts and Google Alerts and they will do a great job of any mentions on blogs/articles as well as in news stories.

• Mention – Mention offers both free and paid versions, and it does a great job of roaming around social channels for mentioning about your brand. If you are using the free version of the product, you are limited to getting only a certain number of alert notifications. Also, you will be run out of notifications each month because of how thorough it is, so if you want more features to your tool then go for the paid version.

• Hootsuite – For social management and engagement, Hootsuite can be used as a primary tool, and its notifications of mentions on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are really helpful. You can even set up a column/stream that searches specifically for your brand name apart from actual “@-mentions” on the microblogging site. Also, you can respond to mentions from right there in the Hootsuite dashboard or app. This tool also offers both free and premium versions, and it is up to you, choose the version best suited to your needs.

• Topsy – Topsy also offers both free and paid versions, and this tool is effective as the tools mentioned above in scouring social channels and news websites. As with any ORM software, the premium version of Topsy has some added features, but if you cannot afford or doesn’t need extra features, then you can go for the free version of this ORM tool. This tool allows you to quickly toggle back and forth between different ranges of date so that you can visualize trends over various periods of time.

These are some of the tools that help you in managing brand monitoring and reputation management on the web. If you need more help on successfully implementing this campaign, you can consult with experts who are willing to provide services as per your budget specifications.