How Good Is Your Online Reputation?
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.
Why You Need to Track 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 some element of reputation management.
1. Your Online Presence Is Everywhere
There are many platforms online for you – and your customers – to find information about a business. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor… the list is endless.
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 is 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.
26 Customer Review Sites for Collecting Business Reviews2. 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 online reputation repair. 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 what is being done to your brand.
3 Tools That Can Help You Monitor Your Online Reputation
As you can see, it’s essential to know how to track your online reputation. Here are 3 reputation management tools.
1. Set Up Google Alerts
One way to monitor your online reputation is by setting up Google Alerts. This Google reputation management system 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 is a free online reputation management tool that 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. This means you can see what people 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 level.
The Best Customer Review Sites for Collecting Business Reviews
There are two major reasons why customer reviews are important for your reputation. First, negative or neutral reviews provide your company with an opportunity to learn and develop. You can see exactly where your business is failing to meet customer needs and remove common roadblocks in the customer journey.
Second, reviews provide the opportunity to enhance your online reputation and share them with potential customers. Positive reviews can be used as customer testimonials during lead acquisition. In fact, 92% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product after reading a positive online review.
Check out this list of the top Business Review Websites from HubSpot and get free access to over 40 Customer Referral Templates where you’ll find everything from pre-written emails to ask for referrals to copy you can use on your company’s social media pages.
