Posted by Once you’re online, the world is allowed to have its own opinions of your company, but they’re not always positive and the worst thing you can do is ignore the negative reviews and keep doing what’s potentially driving customers away.
How can this be solved?
If you’ve got social media accounts for your company, with sites such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, then there’s an easy solution. Online reputation management (or ORM) is made simple by ORM tools, which work with the social media sites you have to make sure you know how your audience feels about your company and its online presence. But what tools are out there, and which should you use?
1. You
“You might not have thought about this, but you actually have one of the greatest tools out there – go Incognito on your web browser and search for your company’s name.” – Grace Bernard, a reputation manager at Writinity and LastMinuteWriting.
“You’re now a potential customer, browsing the internet to see if your company is reliable, good-quality, trustworthy, etc. See what sites come up – and if they’re yours, since a weak internet presence is the worst thing of all – and trawl them for reviews to find out the general views on your company. It might not be precise and it might not be the most effective ORM method out there, but it’s good for first looks and impressions, and will introduce you to the public’s general thoughts on you, preparing you for a more in-depth look.”
2. Awario
When you’re studying ORM with relation to your company, the more information and knowledge you have, the better. You can never stack up enough data on the ever-changing opinions of people on the internet, and that’s where Awario comes in. It monitors who’s writing about you, where they come from and if it’s positive or negative comments, among many other factors packed into this life-saving ORM tool.
You could even turn Awario around and use it to monitor your competition’s companies, making you able to change your services and offer products which your competition’s audience crave but aren’t getting. All in all, it’s an excellent app, and it starts at only around thirty dollars a month for a subscription, so it’s definitely worth looking into.
3. GoFish
If you’re looking for another free option for monitoring your presence on the internet, then GoFish is the website to look at.
“It’s like an amazing little search engine for negative or critical results about your company and it uses Google’s engine, just with a critical eye. It has the power and reach of that massive search engine, with a smart filter which only shows you the ‘bad’ reviews of your company. If you’re going through a rough patch, GoFish might be your best option to figure out what’s wrong and fix it – fast!” – Debra Vickers, a tech blogger at DraftBeyond and ResearchPapersUK
GoFish is a completely free website as well, so you lose nothing from checking it out and have possibly everything to gain since it could help you turn your company’s reputation right around.
4. ReviewTrackers
Reading through every single review of your company posted online can be a tiring and thankless task, so why not get an app which can do it for you? ReviewTrackers uses over one hundred review sites and analyses the data from them related to your company, sending you email alerts and customized reports on the data that it finds once you’ve been using the service for a little while. If you’ve got a specific problem with your company that keeps getting mentioned, then ReviewTrackers notices this as well and will inform you about it. It’s an easy way to look through reviews without getting half-way through and having strained eyes and a headache, but it does cost approximately fifty dollars a month for the basic package, so research it heavily before investing.
Conclusion
Depending on the scale of your business and the severity of what you may perceive as ORM emergencies, you may only need to use a free tool like GoFish to figure out where your problems are and how to solve them. However, if you’ve got thousands of reviews and constant comments and shares on social media, then you’re going to need something a bit more upscale, which is where the paid services kick in.
Make sure you use the correct tool and exhaust each option before progressing to the next, to make sure you’re at the right level of ORM for you and your company.
This is a guest post by Ashley Halsey. She writes professionally at both Lucky Assignments and Gum Essays, and has thus been involved in countless projects up and down the country. As the mother of two children, she is no stranger to responsibility, and also attends business courses in her spare time.