Internet has become a major part of our lives. We spend a lot of time online. Whether it is search engines, blogs, websites, social media sites or forums, our online exposure is increasing at a rapid pace.
Businesses are also using internet to reach maximum people. This is why businesses have started to avail SEO services, social media and other online marketing services to get more visibility and consequently more customers.
With increasing online visibility, risk of reputation maligning from competitors is also increasing. People can write anything in their blog posts, blog comments, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and malign you or your company’s reputation anytime and anywhere online. These acts may affect yours or your business’s online reputation. Thus, constant monitoring of online reputation is a must.
Here are 10 free tools that can help you to monitor online reputation:
1. Google Alerts
It is one of the best free content monitoring services available because it helps you to monitor traditional as well as social media. You can give a search term in the alert and the latest Google result on the concerned search term(s) will be notified to you through email updates.
If you want to monitor negative comments about you or your company then you may set a Google Alert similar to “your name” or “your business name” and know what is being said about you or your company.
2. Yahoo! Site Explorer
This free tool helps you to monitor the external links to your company’s site or blog. If anyone writes negative things about you or your business then it is most likely that he or she will give a link back to your site or profile. This free tool will help you to know about the negative external links.
3. Technorati
It is one of the most popular search engines of blogs. Conversation of bloggers can be monitored with its help because millions of blogs are indexed on a real time basis. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of Technorati to monitor negative aspects said in the blogs and their blog comments.
4. Delicious
Delicious is a well known social bookmarking website. You can monitor your online reputation by searching your name, business name and services offered in the search box of this social bookmarking site.
5. Twitter
Twitter is a popular online social networking site that helps people to express themselves within 140 characters. You can search this site or subscribe their RSS feed to monitor what is being said about you or your company in this highly popular social media platform.
6. Versionista
This free tool is especially helpful for those people or businesses that are facing problem in their online reputation. Versionista monitors a particular web page of interest and alerts you with email notifications about the added or removed sentences or words.
7. Knowem
Identity theft is a real problem in the virtual world. So, monitoring your name in the social media (networking and bookmarking) is extremely important. You can monitor presence of username, corporate name or personal name in more than 400 social media sites with the help of Knowem.
8. SocialMention
If you want to know what people are saying or discussing about you or your company in social media on a real time basis then SocialMention is the site for you.
9. SamePoint
This tool analyses millions of conversations in the social media space and lets you know whether social tone of the conversation is positive or negative.
10. Google SideWiki
It is a browser plug-in, which helps users of Gmail to post their comments on a site. The site owners can prevent negative feedbacks by addressing the entries that have negative connotations.
Written by Derick Branson
Derick Branson is an experienced writer, SEO analyst and online marketer. He is an expert social media professional and his domain of expertise is reputation management. Derick has worked for many leading online marketing companies and has amassed immense hands-on knowledge on social media and SEO services.
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Great thanks for the share. This is going to help people like me to monitor all negative feedback regarding my business and website.
Wow this is great, Those top ten was really useful to everyone glad to see this in here..
Hi
You can look at this three ways: as the party that was wronged; as the party who delivered an insufficient service; as someone looking to drum up business. As the wronged party, then there are plenty of public forums where you can say what happened or not as the case may be, which SEO well – but say it once, and keep it to the facts of the service problem not your opinion on Mr/Mrs X. If you are the person or business who delivered an incorrect service, then I think in all courses you need a form of direct address, inline with any comments and as an alternative to legal action. The simple rules here are that a customer won over – almost at what ever cost – is a better ambassador than one where you just did what was required. But how many businesses apply this, and how many customers now exploit this to their own advantage? Personally, name and shame only works if you really have been, stick to the facts.