Social Media Monitoring is used to monitor your brand’s reputation, your competitors movements, and as an effective tool for market research. It can help solve customer complaints or questions, collate suggestions and help your product development and to prevent and mitigate negative coverage.
There are plenty of tools at your disposal – both free and at a price – to monitor your presence on social media as well as your companies online reputation. You can hire an online reputation management firm, employ management tools in-house or you can utilize a combination of both.
You need a system which gives you a single, complete view of Social Media, with relevant, clean data and easy-to-find actionable insights. With such a system you will be able to actively respond and engage with your customers, and write up great and timely reports.
There are a host of free or low cost tools available to help companies and organizations track social media success. Use one or more of these social media monitoring tools to gauge how well your efforts are working.
Examples include PostRank Analytics and Trackur. A lot of analytics tools, such as Raven Tools, have added a social mentions feature to their software. Tracking can also be as simple as Google searches on your brand and frequent trolling of Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. Some excellent free tools include Google Alerts and Social Mention. But if it’s within budget you need a social media monitoring tool as part of your web strategy. It will be much easier for you to manage the information and track your company’s online reputation.
Tips on Managing Your Company’s Online Reputation
Managing the reputation of a company (or brand) requires plenty of virtual foot work. It takes dedication to your brand and the willingness to work hard in order to influence and improve the way cyberspace views a brand. The following are tips that would help in the process
Start Blogging
Search engines acknowledge web sites with fresh content but even more importantly so do existing and potential clients. Blogging enables a company to engage in a conversation with its customers and the feedback that could result in such a conversation is highly valuable. It informs a company what it is doing right and where it can improve.
Own your business’ name
It is vital that you own all the domain names of your business, such as YourCompnayName.com.au, YourCompanyName.biz, YourCompanyName.net.au, etc. It is also recommended owning YourPersonalName.com and having content there that would link to your business website. This would decrease the likelihood of someone blemishing your credibility.
Create an Online Profiles for your company
Search engines and humans prefer a number of different sources for their information. A company profile on a directory can direct traffic in the direction of your home page.
Track your company’s online reputation
Setting up a Google alert for the name of your business is a good start but it is hardly enough. A business needs to constantly be searching itself on different search engines in order to know how its doing. This practice often influences strategy of a campaign or use of social networking. There are already popular tools such as Klout and Social Mention that you can utilise.
Respond quickly
If someone online is saying negative things about your company, try and find out why and whether you can assist in solving the problem. Ignoring negative feedback can cause further harm down the road and it is advisable to react quickly in attempting to prevent further escalation of the problem.
