One of the big changes from the pre-Internet era is the vast amount of information about you that is publicly available. Once information is posted online, it usually stays there forever. It is therefore essential that you monitor your online reputation and do everything in your control to minimize damaging statements about you or your company. There are a number of online reputation management tools you can use to help you understand your reputation, then improve it and minimize the dangers of more damaging references.
Online reputation management is the process you go through to highlight the positive things about you online, and disable the negative feelings about you online.
In certain situations, online reputation management can take a significant amount of effort. Fortunately, there is a variety of paid and free online reputation management tools that can make your efforts easier.
Online reputation management practices are the same whether you are interested in your own name online or focusing on your company's reputation. As we discussed earlier, personal branding is just as important online as corporate branding. Potential employers Google candidates' names to see what the internet can tell them. And you may have parts of your past that you'd prefer to have disappeared. Even your social accounts can be a problem, especially if you treated them too "socially" in your youth.
So how do you find out what people are saying about you online? Here are some of the best online reputation management tools you can check out.
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20 Best Business and Personal Online Reputation Management Tools
1. Google Alerts
The internet is constantly changing. This means that someone can publish an article that refers to you at any time. You can create a Google Alert for your name (whether it's your personal name or your company name).
Google will send you an email when it detects a new mention of your name. This will make it easier for you to take action, in case the mention is not flattering.
For example, this is an alert for (Jaguars):
You will receive email notifications of your mentions according to your preferences: as they happen, at least once a day, and at most once a week.
2. Brand24
With Brand24, you create projects. Each Project tracks the social mentions of one entity. At higher levels, you can have multiple projects, track more than one brand, or even specific campaigns of a brand.
You can search by simply typing in a list of keywords or specifying which keywords to include and which to exclude, to ensure you don't get mentions that don't match what you're looking for.
Brand24 doesn't just pull mentions from social media. It scours the entire web for every occurrence of your non-excluded keywords. It collects all public mentions available on social networks, news sites, videos, blogs, websites, discussion forums, Google reviews, and other sources in real-time.
Brand24 offers several ways to filter your data. You can drill down by day, week, or month. You can filter by source as well as other criteria to help you identify your most important (and influential) champions. You can even filter by sentiment to see who has been bashing you. Plus, you can easily analyze the data with an information-rich report.
Brand24's comparison tool allows you to compare the results of all your projects side by side.
3. Social Mention
SocialMention monitors the web and retrieves real-time social media searches and analyses. Simply enter your brand name, choose from Blogs, Microblogs, Bookmarks, Images, Videos, Questions, or All, then press Search.
The system displays the last day's mentions, with a guide to the sentiment of each mention. It also summarizes the sentiment into positive, negative, and neutral mentions, and lists your top keywords, hashtags, users, and sources.
SocialMention provides overall statistics about you, with scores for strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.
4. Digimind
Digimind is a powerful online reputation management tool that offers a multitude of features to help brands get to the bottom of what's going on around their online reputation and offerings. While it offers impressive features, it remains intuitive. Powered by AI, it is trusted by big names like Lexus Asia Pacific and Renault.
You can use it to track your competitors' brands and products, as well as listen to conversations about your own brand and products on social networks. Its metrics are equally impressive. You can take advantage of in-depth analysis to get actionable insights.
One of its features that deserves special mention is its exclusive natural language processing, which can even handle slang. With all this information at your fingertips, you're perfectly positioned to identify and anticipate potential problems and adapt your branding strategy. In short, it's not just about managing your online reputation, it's about being proactive and staying one step ahead.
It uses custom pricing, and packages can vary from per seat to volume-based packages. Digimind offers demonstrations upon request.
5. SEMrush
SEMrush allows you to monitor online mentions, including sentiment scores and authority of resources.
SEMrush allows limited and free use, but it is part of the SEMrush package. Here are some examples of what this tool allows you to do:
- Find mentions without backlinks.
- Find industry influencers.
- Measure your estimated reach.
- Track referral traffic from mentions.
- Identify the sentiment of the mention.
- Analyze the authority of mentions' resources.
6. Brandwatch (Formerly Falcon.io)
While we classify Brandwatch as a social media marketing platform, it is, in fact, much more than that. It solves critical problems for brands that want to be leaders on social media. These include tracking your company's online reputation and developing strategies to deal with potential issues.
It features a customizable and intuitive interface. Brandwatch's search, filtering, tagging, and tracking capabilities are also highlighted.
While Brandwatch includes modules on publishing, engagement, advertising, audience analysis, measurement, and benchmarking, its social listening capabilities will be of most interest to companies looking to work on their online reputation management. Brandwatch Listen is powered by Brandwatch and monitors brands across 100 million online sources. You can use it to spot emerging trends and make sense of online conversations.
Listen lets you discover trends in what people are saying about your brand, products, and competitors in real-time so you can react faster. You can also monitor mentions to figure out what makes your customers tick and what content resonates with them. Analyze brand sentiment and perception without having to manually sift through large data sets.
Listen uses artificial intelligence to detect spikes and drops in your data and alert you to any unusual activity. It also automatically alerts you when it sees negative reviews so your team can act quickly on an emerging crisis.
Listen connects to Brandwatch's unified social inbox, which you can customize to your liking. Analyze, monitor, and act on what you hear on social networks and via forums, review sites, and more.
7. SentiOne
SentiOne helps you pay attention to what your customers or others, in general, are saying about your brand. You have access not only to real-time data but also to historical data. You can monitor mentions of your brand, social profiles, or other keywords.
SentiOne crawls thousands of web sources to find mentions of your brand. To prevent information overload, you can easily filter the number of keywords you track.
SentiOne also offers data visualizations and aggregations to make information management easier.
You can filter results into positive or negative mentions, the latter of which can help you act quickly to avoid a crisis if necessary.
8. YouScan
In its simplest form, YouScan is a listening tool, capable of scanning social media and the rest of the web for brand mentions, then analyzing those mentions for broader social impact. It finds billions of data points that you can sift through, as well as a multitude of ways to analyze that data. Its real gem is its image recognition feature, which allows users to be remarkably accurate in their visual searches.
You start by setting up Boolean searches to find the data you need. Once YouScan has identified data that meets your search criteria, you can access a page that shows you all the mentions the platform has collected that match those criteria. You can filter the results in a number of ways to get only what is relevant to your search. With Visual Insights, you can be very precise in searching for all the images that show up - an incredibly accurate AI engine provides image recognition.
Analysis tools include interactive graphs and charts that describe all the major trends for the topics of your choice. You can click anywhere on the charts to drill down and see the messages behind the numbers.
9. Reputology
Reputology is a review monitoring and management platform that helps businesses monitor, respond to and analyze online reviews.
It's a tool that allows you to both find reviews about your business and respond appropriately to any negative sentiment you find.
This is particularly helpful for businesses that depend on online reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and other major review sites.
Reputology is location-specific, which is especially important for businesses that sell to a local market.
You can use Reputology to track written reviews of your sites, products, and services.
But Reputology offers more than just the ability to collect all your reviews on a single dashboard. It sends you automatic email notifications of new reviews, and you can respond directly from the platform.
It provides semantic analysis to convert unstructured review content into actionable data.
Reputology even provides a decision tree to guide you through the common scenarios of dealing with a negative review.
It provides the tools to help you track how your team has tracked and responded to reviews.
10. BrandMentions
BrandMentions does not limit its listening to a few channels. All major social media platforms are represented here, as well as non-social websites, such as news, blog, and review sites.
You go through a full setup, first identifying the keywords you want to track - most often your company name and/or social handle. You can also monitor your competitors' keywords and social handles. You can configure your project by requiring or excluding specific keywords from appearing in your results. The platform displays a sentiment analysis for each mention, and you can filter your results accordingly.
Once you've created your project, it takes less than a minute before you can see the breakdown of your mentions. You can filter the results in several ways, and you can select a specific mention to get a more in-depth view. For social posts, you can reply directly from the BrandMention interface.
If you continue to use BrandMentions, the data pool will continue to grow.
11. ReviewPush
You can use Review Push to gather all your online reviews in one place. It offers multi-site monitoring and an unlimited number of sites. This makes it especially useful for businesses with branches in different regions.
The ability to compare your store rankings against each other is also useful for multi-site businesses.
Every time your business receives a new review, Review Push notifies you via email. The email gives you the ability to respond to your reviews online.
12. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo takes a somewhat different approach than the other online reputation management tools on this list. It lets you crawl the web to find any content that includes your search term. Its main feature is that it includes the level of engagement associated with each search result.
You can search using the following filters:
Date
B2B publishers
Country
Language
Domain
Type of content
Number of words
Publisher size
BuzzSumo provides engagement numbers for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It provides the total number of links each search result received.
BuzzSumo provides a content analysis report. This features detailed graphs focusing on engagement in articles on the topic of your choice.
Perhaps most importantly for online reputation management, you can create alerts in BuzzSumo to track:
Brand mentions
Competitor mentions
Website content
Keyword mentions
Backlinks
An author
You can set inclusions and exclusions, a minimum commitment value that must be met before receiving an alert, and choose to receive alerts instantly, daily, or not at all.
13. Chatmeter
Chatmeter was designed to help businesses collect and analyze customer reviews and improve the customer experience for brands and multi-location agencies.
It alerts you through email to any reviews found on more than 20 local search and review sites.
Plus, you'll receive notifications when there's new content about your brand.
Chatmeter lets you spy on your local competitors to see how you stack up against them and what you can learn from their activities.
Their widget lets you share reviews from external sites on your website and store pages.
And, when you create a new profile on one listing site, your profiles on other listing sites are automatically updated with any current information.
They also give you a useful brand visibility score, to check your brand's online presence against its major local competitors.
14. Your Web Browser
If you're actively looking to improve your online reputation management, the first line 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 search results. The first page is the most important, as few people click on the second or subsequent pages in a search.
It might be best if you search incognito, as browsers sometimes have a habit of customizing your searches, which would result in the wrong set of results for your name. It's essential that you don't do a Google search when you're logged in as yourself or your business.
Look at each result, and decide first if the result refers to you or not. Divide each result into one of the following categories:
Negative - the result is about you and does not show you in a favorable light. Naturally, all court reports and media reports about crimes will appear here, but there are many other types of negative search results. It may be rants from your ex-partners. It may be negative social comments from unsatisfied customers. It could be a "mistake" from your past - the tagged Facebook photo of you streaking in your university days. It may even be a false and nasty allegation from someone you've upset.
Neutral - results that do not harm or help your reputation. This could be your position in a school athletics race, a review of a soccer game you participated in, or a reference to your membership in a local club.
About someone else - if you search on your personal name, you are likely to find results about people with the same name as you. This is less likely in the case of a business, but there will always be cases of businesses with more generic names. For example, if the American web developer Castle searches for his name on Google, he will find that the search results are dominated by references to the TV series Castle.
Positive and helpful - hopefully you'll see positive content that shows you in a good light.
Don't get too upset if the number one result on Google isn't about you. Only 50% of people can claim ownership of the top result for their name. In fact, only 2% of people can claim all the items on the first page of search results.
15. RankRanger
RankRanger is a commonly used SEO tool, but it also has a robust online reputation manager.
This tool allows you to check for negative or defamatory content in search engine results, as well as monitor SERP changes and the impact of your reputation management work on your visibility.
16. The Brand Grader
If you want to check your company's reputation, The Brand Grader can provide you with useful information about your brand's performance online.
It is free and easy to use. Just enter your brand name and provide an email account.
The Brand Grader sends you a report about your business. It gives a quick overview of the brand's online presence. The report includes details from the last seven days about:
- Your biggest web influencers - blogs and news sites that have talked about you.
- Your top sources - the web and social sources that mentioned your brand the most.
- Sentiment detection - whether the majority of your mentions are positive or negative.
- Mention overview - how many mentions your brand has received on websites, blogs, and forums
- Locations of mentions - where conversations about your brand are coming from
- Social following - how many people follow you on different social media platforms.
17. Reputation Health
If you have a medical practice, or if you offer SEO and other online marketing services to medical practices, you may need Reputation Health.
It offers online reputation management and online review tracking for physicians.
The tool also monitors 23 medical practice-related review sites, including DrScore, HealthGrades, UcompareHealthcare, and Vitals.
Reputation Health collects online mentions and reviews of the practice and sends you email alerts.
Quality measures in medical practices are always important, but this type of reputation monitoring can keep you one step ahead of any issues.
18. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides comprehensive analysis for any website or application. It gives you a wealth of information about your site - the main face of the customer for most businesses.
It also gives you information about your competitors' sites. This gives you an easy way to compare your site to your competitors' sites. It gives you information about your industry, so you know how well respected your brand is in your niche.
19. GatherUp
Every company that sells knows the value of five-star reviews. The more five-star reviews you have, the more trustworthy you appear to potential customers.
That's all well and good, but encouraging customers to leave reviews can be difficult, no matter how great your service is.
Good companies have an even harder time getting reviews than bad ones. People are much more likely to complain online than to give compliments.
GatherUp was previously called GetFiveStars. The new name sounds more ethical.
GatherUp helps you build a continuous cycle of customer reviews and feedback that you can use to convert more customers. It allows you to reach out to your customers via email or SMS, asking them to give a review of your product.
GatherUp also monitors over 30 review sites like Google, Facebook, Trip Advisor, and the BBB. It captures a Net Promoter Score, survey questions, and customer reviews. It sends you emails when you receive new reviews.
20. Reputation.com
Reputation.com is an online reputation management (ORM) tool designed more for large enterprises and businesses. It helps large companies monitor, manage and optimize their online reputation through a comprehensive suite of solutions.
Their services include:
Online reviews - requesting feedback from local customers.
Surveys - collecting detailed customer feedback
Social Suite - allows businesses to engage with their community, strengthening their reputation and driving purchase decisions
Business Listings - help businesses optimize their listings, making it easier for customers to find them.
Make sense of the data collected, identify emerging issues, strengths and weaknesses, and make targeted operational improvements that drive positive reviews
Reputation Live - allow your site's frontline sales reps to request reviews online on their mobile devices immediately after customer interactions.
