Online reputation management is something no brand can ignore. Online posts, comments, reviews, and rankings are what makes or breaks a brand’s reputation.

• Best Reputation Management Tools For Small Businesses Near Me
• Best Reputation Management Tools For Small Businesses Use
• Best Reputation Management Tools For Small Businesses Business

The practices of online reputation management are the same, whether you are looking at your own name online, or whether you are focusing on your business reputation. Check out the leading 15 Online Reputation Management Tools and Software for 2020. Best Reputation Management Software For Small Business. Reputation Management and presence monitoring tools help businesses stay on top of all the information that relates directly to their online reputation. In the past these tools were only available to corporations with large marketing budgets, but in the last four or five years they have. Rannko is a cloud-based digital reputation management solution for small businesses. The solution provides modules for review management, listing management, task management and social media post scheduling.

It won’t surprise you that 88 percent of buyers research products online before making a purchase (both online and in-store), and 86 percent will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative reviews. And then there are social media crises: negative posts about a brand spread on social media, letting more and more people know that the customer service/the product/the marketing is terrible, offensive, or wrong. Social media crises come and go, leaving dozens of broken businesses behind. Online reputation management can stop such disasters when they are just unfolding.

Whether your brand is new to the market, or has been building a reputation since the 1980s, keeping an eye on what’s going on online ― social media, review sites, search rankings, etc. ― is essential in the world where public opinion is inspired by the Internet and expressed on the Internet.

With this in mind, we gathered online reputation management tools that will help you take care of your brand and save it from possible troubles.

1. Awario

Yes, including our own tool, especially as number one, is tacky. But we’re not here to do tricky marketing: we’re here to list awesome reputation management tools, and Awario is one of them.

In case you’re new to the blog, Awario is a social media monitoring tool: it finds mentions of any given brand on social media networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and the web. With Awario, you can see how many people are talking about your brand, where they are, who they are, and what they say.

Built-in sentiment analysis breaks down all mentions into positive, negative, and neutral. At any time you can open the app and see how your brand’s reputation is changing. If there is unusual activity regarding your brand online, Awario lets you know and shows you what might be the underlying cause for the activity with the help of Insights. Of course, for the tool to do that, you have to create an alert for your brand (as a matter of fact, you can do that for any other keyword, e.g., your own name).

Pricing: Awario’s Starter is $29/mo, Pro is ($89/mo), and Enterprise starts from $299/mo. An annual plan saves you two months. Awario offers a 7-day free trial.

2. Reputology

The name Reputology signals reputation management ― and that’s exactly what the tool does. However, it does it in a much different way than Awario. Reputology helps businesses track their online reviews on common and uncommon review sites. This includes such popular hits as Google Reviews, Facebook Reviews, Yelp, Amazon, etc., but Reputology also monitors industry-specific review sites that focus on real estate, hospitality, and healthcare.

Reputology lets you reply to reviews straight from the app. It’s also integrated with Hootsuite, so if you have one social media manager for all the online marketing tasks (this happens quite often, doesn’t it), connecting Reputology and Hootsuite accounts will massively simplify their work.

Pricing: Reputology charges from $10 to $49/mo for every location. You can sign up for a free trial before you settle on a plan.

3. SEO SpyGlass

You might think: what does a boring SEO tool do in this list of fun social tools? The fact is, online reputation has a lot to do with how your site and your backlink profile look, and what your Google rankings are. SEO SpyGlass, therefore, is here to monitor your backlink profile and not let any spammy links get associated with your website and ruin your rankings.

SEO SpyGlass claims to have the most up-to-date link index on the market, and we have no reason not to trust them. But that’s not the main advantage of this tool: it also analyzes the authority of each of your links and measures the Penalty Risk of your backlinks, saving your website from possible algorithmic and manual search engine penalties.

Pricing: There’s a free version available with a limited number of backlinks to analyze. Paid plans start at $124.75 per year.

Best Reputation Management Tools For Small Businesses Near Me

4. ReviewTrackers

Back to tracking online reviews: as you might imagine, this is one of the most important and most requested processes of reputation management. If Reputology didn’t cover whatever review sites you’re interested in, try ReviewTrackers: it covers more than a hundred review sites. The tool also emails you important reviews so that you don’t have to constantly check the app if you’re getting tons of reviews.

ReviewTrackers analyzes the ongoing customer feedback and presents you with some conclusions as to which aspects of your business are mentioned the most and might require your attention.

Pricing: ReviewTrackers’ Professional plan is $49/mo and Enterprise is $59/mo. Agency plan’s pricing is available on request.

5. GoFish Digital Complaint Search

Surely, searching for complaints about your own brand might not seem like a pleasant task. But it’s the minimum of what you’ve got to do if you don’t have the resources to monitor the online world 24/7.

GoFishDigital Complaint Search covers more than 40 complaint websites. You can find the complaints, respond to them, and fix the problems before they turn into disasters, i.e. start ranking in Google for your branded keywords. In some cases, you can also remove the reviews that are damaging your reputation. Of course, you’ll also see the most popular complaints, reviews, and your brand’s overall rating.

Pricing: free

6. GatherUp

Sometimes, reputation management is also about tweaking the online image of your brand.

The problem with online reputation is that people tend to leave negative reviews and ignore their positive experiences. When the product or the customer service is satisfactory, but not outstanding, people ignore this fact as something obvious. On the other hand, if there is even a minor problem, unhappy customers turn to the Internet to leave their angry reviews. As a result, the final image is usually skewed.

To fix that, you need some way to encourage your customers to leave reviews. GatherUp is such a tool: it allows you to actively ask customers for a review of your product. The tool sends a personalized request to your customers. In such a case, your existing customers don’t have a reason not to leave a review.

Pricing: GatherUp’s Pro is $75/mo per location, Pro Plus is 99$, and Executive is $199.

7. Grade.us

Grade.us is a tool similar to GatherUp. It helps you generate, monitor and market online reviews on the sites important to your business. The tool encourages the existing customers to leave reviews by using customized email campaigns, text messages and templates for physical assets. In addition to that, it notifies you via email whenever new reviews are published, tracks review performance, and runs sentiment analysis.

The tool is perfect both for businesses and for marketing agencies, as it generates white-label reports that reveal everything to do with the brand’s review performance.

Pricing: Grade.us’s Professional plan is $180/mo, Agency is $400/mo, and Enterprise is 2500/mo. A free trial is available.

Over to you

Have you tried any of these tools? What did you think of them? Are there any others that you’d like to add?

Let me know in the comment section.

Content Manager at Awario

For many small businesses, dealing with an online presence can be a bit daunting. It can take a lot of time to maintain a website and a presence on various social media platforms. Many small businesses find it hard to simply maintain a Facebook page or Twitter account, let alone do them well. As a result, many businesses turn their social media management over to hired guns, many of whom seem to simply do the bare minimum: a post here, a tweet there, and that’s that.

But one element of a strong social and online presence that’s often forgotten is that of brand monitoring and reputation management. It’s not enough to simply post on your favorite social channels from time to tie. You need to keep your ear to the ground and find out what people are saying, or not saying, about you and your competition.

Best Reputation Management Tools For Small Businesses Use

Here are 9 free tools that I use regularly (some have premium versions) to make sure I know what customers and others are saying about our business, allowing us to respond properly, while also learning where we can improve.

1. Google Alerts

This is the granddaddy of all brand monitoring tools, but it’s important to set up these free Google Alerts so that you get an email notification any time someone mentions your business or something related to your business. Not foolproof, but a good starter. You can get them anytime Google finds a mention, or set it for reports once a day or once a week. I prefer the “as it happens” feature so that I can make sure I have the ability to respond in a timely fashion if need be. It might be a good idea to monitor common misspellings of your business name or your own name, as well.

2. Talkwalker Alerts

A few years ago there was talk of Google shutting down the Alerts product, and a lot of folks turned to Talkwalker Alerts. I’ve found that Talkwalker often finds more mentions than Google, so that’s a good thing. I use both, so quite often I’m getting some redundancies, but it’s worth it to make sure I’m covered. These two tools do a great job of any mentions on blogs as well as in news stories.

3. Reputology

Reputology might be my favorite of the bunch because it specifically searches for mentions on review sites like Yelp, Foursquare, Google My Business, and other sites where customers have the chance to leave reviews. For some reason, neither Google nor Talkwalker alerts scour these sites. This is one where I use the free version, but a more robust premium version is available. As it turns out, while I was writing this blog post, two notifications came in: one for a good review, and one for a less than stellar review.

This allows me to easily pass these reviews along to my coworkers, as well as to respond properly to the reviewer. We take negative reviews seriously, and want to use them as learning experiences. The notifications give me links so I can see the actual reviews where they are, or I can use the Reputology Dashboard to see them all together, regardless of which site they are on. This allows me to get a nice snapshot of how we’re doing. The dashboard also provides some analytics so you can measure your online reputation.

4. Mention

Another free tool that offers a premium version, Mention does a great job of scouring the social web for mentions of your business. The biggest problem with the free version is that you are limited to getting only a certain number of notifications. I find that I run out of notifications each month because of how thorough it is, so have toyed with paying for the premium version.

5. Social Mention

Social Mention is another free tool that combs through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social sites for business mentions. Plug in your name and set it up as an alert and you’ll start seeing how and when you’re mentioned. As an added feature, the tool also includes a sentiment analysis gauge so you can see if your mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. That said, I’ve found that like most sentiment analysis tools, that aspect of the tool isn’t very good, often marking positive mentions as either neutral or negative. There is also a keyword feature so that you can tell which aspect of your business gets the most conversation going.

6. Platform specific alerts

Less a tool than it is a setting, most platforms from Facebook business pages to Twitter and Google + will allow you to get some sort of notification, either through email or a smart phone app alert, when there has been activity on your pages, or if someone has tagged you. I rely on the smart phone alerts so that I can quickly check these mentions and respond, if need be. With very little intrusion, this can make your business look as if you are active online 24/7, which can impress your customers. When I respond to tweets or comments in the evening or on weekends, people are often pleasantly surprised.

And yes, I confess that I even responded to a tweet during my son’s wedding reception last week. It took all of 1o-seconds, and no one was all the wiser, since we were all using our smart phones to take pictures and videos of the reception anyway. I guess this makes me a bad dad, eh?

7. Hootsuite

While Hootsuite is primarily a tool for social management and engagement, its notifications of mentions on Twitter, Facebook, and more are really helpful. You can even set up a stream/column that searches specifically for your business name (or anything else related to you) apart form actual “@-mentions” on Twitter. And you can respond to mentions from right there in the Hootsuite app or dashboard. Again, I use the free version even though there is a nice paid-version available.

8. Topsy

To be honest, I rarely use this tool, but Topsy is another good option for scouring both the social web and news sites. There is a premium version available with some added features, but for most small businesses, the free version should suffice. This tool allows you to quickly toggle back and forth between different date ranges so that you can visualize trends over various periods of time.

9. Moz Local

Moz Local is not really a tool for brand monitoring, but it can certainly make the job a lot easier. You might not even realize that your business is listed on any number of directory and location based sites and platforms. Moz Local will not only help you find those listings, but walk you through claiming them and optimizing them so that they feature accurate information and are consistent across the board. By claiming these directory listings, you can then set them up so that you are notified of any reviews or changes made by others. And, if you don’t mind spending a little money, they’ll help you manage all of these diverse listings, as it can be quite time consuming, and frustrating, to do it yourself.

Best Reputation Management Tools For Small Businesses Business

These are just a few of the tools that are available for the all-important tasks of brand monitoring and reputation management, but a quick Google search will help you find quite a few more. My personal tool kit consists of #’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, & 9, but you can play around with them and find the right mix for you and your business. And remember, you can use these tools not just to discover what others are saying about you, but to learn from negative comments and get better at what you do.