Knowing what people are saying about you isn’t just a vanity exercise — this is critical information that can impact your business. Your brand reputation can make or break you. Which is why online reputation monitoring tools are an essential component of any social media manager’s software setup.
Think of it like modern, ethical eavesdropping: online reputation monitoring tools allow you to be a savvy social media super-spy. Go on, listen in! Don’t be shy!
Why invest in online reputation management tools?
Online reputation monitoring tools allow you to listen closely to online conversations, track keywords and mentions, and keep your eyes peeled for industry news that might impact your business. Once you’ve got your finger firmly on the pulse, you can measure, manage, and optimize brand sentiment — helping the world see you for the trustworthy, authentic business that you are.
Trusted brands are successful brands. Fifty-eight percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands they trust, and 67% are likely to advocate for those brands, too.
But you can’t fight nasty rumors or help dissatisfied customers if you don’t hear the grumbles first. And you can’t give a boost to your superfans and supporters if you’re not aware of their flattery. It’s time to take charge of your reputation and make it work for you — read on for the ultimate list of online reputation management tools.
Bonus: Download a free guide to learn how to use social media listening to boost sales and conversions today. No tricks or boring tips—just simple, easy-to-follow instructions that really work.
8 of the best online reputation management tools
Online reputation monitoring tools are a social media manager’s best friend. These are programs that help you catch flattering posts and positive customer experiences that you can re-share with the world — and stop not-so-nice commentary before it spreads too far.
Google Alerts
Think of Google Alerts as your helpful but not super insightful personal assistant: someone who can be trusted to collect all of the days news and gossip about you, but who isn’t going to provide any deep context or analysis along with it.
Still: having regular emails delivered whenever your brand name (or product name, or campaign name, or mascot name, or whatever else you set up as your alert words) is a quick and easy way to stay on top of the conversation.
Plus, you don’t need any special software or linked social media accounts to access Google Alerts. Which means you can even set up alerts for news about your competitors (or your rival CEO!), too.
Hootsuite
Surprise! Hootsuite is on the list. But we’re not just playing favorites here. Most people don’t know that Hootsuite is actually a very useful online reputation monitoring tool for companies of all sizes.
Beyond allowing you to schedule your social content across all of your social media platforms, Hootsuite is full of features to help you manage your online reputation.
For beginners, there’s Hootsuite Streams, which tracks brand mentions, keywords and hashtags on multiple platforms, all in one place. (Learn more about the benefits of social listening here!)
Streams shows you your own posts and the engagement you get, and you can set an automatic refresh interval so it’s always updated.
Then, there’s Hootsuite Inbox. This is a tool to help you streamline the process of monitoring and answering DMs, comments, public posts, and mentions (and make sure that your team never accidentally leaves an important message on read, risking escalation into a public PR crisis).
It’s a tool to help you effortlessly bridge the gap between brand monitoring, social media engagement and customer service — and manage all of your social media messages in one place. This includes:
- Private messages and DMs
- Public messages and posts on your profiles
- Dark and organic comments
- Mentions
- Emoji reactions
- … and more.
Plus, Inbox comes with handy automations:
- Automated message routing
- Auto-responses and saved replies
- Automatically triggered customer satisfaction surveys
- AI-powered chatbot features
Inbox is available to Enterprise plan customers. See how it works today!
Hootsuite Insights is another incredible brand monitoring integration (available to Enterprise plan customers), but we’ll save that for a separate point in this list so we can go into more detail.
SEMrush
With SEMrush, you can track and analyze competitor accounts and manage your public brand awareness and brand reputation, too.
The Market Explorer feature allows users to quickly check their brand’s role and classification inside the market; another element of SEM allows you to check keyword and backlink gaps — basically, reviewing the phrases that your brand isn’t affiliated with yet.
Trustpilot
Trustpilot is a review platform designed to instill confidence in consumers, operating with transparency and integrity. (From Trustpilot: “More than just a rating, Trustpilot stars signify to the world that a company has nothing to hide.”)
With the Trustpilot Hootsuite integration, you can monitor your Trustpilot reviews in real-time in your Hootsuite Streams, and effortlessly share your customer reviews on different social networks. By proactively collecting reviews and obtaining real insight from passionate customers, it’s a snap for businesses to leverage authentic experiences to grow their online reputation.
Reputology
Reputology is designed specifically to track reviews across the whole, big, wide internet. From Google to Facebook to employee review sites, Reputology collects reviews 24/7.
Being notified about reviews doesn’t just give you a chance to peep feedback — it also allows you to respond promptly. More than 80% of consumers expect a reply when they leave a review online, so even if it’s a less-than-flattering comment, being responsive is an easy way to gain a little goodwill.
Reputology also helps define the bigger-picture view of all this feedback, with semantic analysis technology that converts content into quantitative, actionable data.
Pro tip: with the Hootsuite Repultology integration, you can review and respond to all of these comments right in the dashboard.
Mentionlytics
You know when people say they wish their superpower was invisibility, so they could hear everything everyone is saying about them without being detected? Well, that’s basically Mentionlytics.
The web and social media monitoring solution lets you discover everything being said about your brand online (or about your competitors, or your brand advocates, or whatever your heart desires) — from news sources to blogs to Twitter to Pinterest.
Bonus: Mentionlytics’ advanced Sentiment Analysis feature detects the emotion of every mention, in any language.
Hootsuite Insights by Brandwatch
See what people are saying about your brand, industry, and competitors with the most powerful social listening tool around. Hootsuite Insights by Brandwatch unlocks the true power of social media to help you better connect with customers and grow your brand.
Set alerts for changes to brand sentiment so you can react quickly and mitigate risk. Keep an eye on how certain products and campaigns are performing and adjust your strategy as needed.
Ultimately, the beauty of Insights is that it takes the guesswork out of online reputation management. With AI technology, Insights cuts through the noise to uncover emerging trends and spot important conversations that might otherwise be missed.
This video gives a short demo of Insights by Brandwatch if you’re curious to learn more. Or get a free customized demo with a human.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s “media intelligence” tracking embraces the idea that businesses need to take a holistic view of their reputations. After all, nothing happens in the real world without making a mark online… and in 2023, the reverse is true now, too. Meltwater’s tools promise an accurate pulse of brand health as well as suggestions for growth.
Discover hidden insights and an in-depth look at your SEO profile, brand equity, and competitors, too.
Pro tip: With the Meltwater Hootsuite integration, it’s super simple to catch and respond to social media posts that mention the keywords you monitor right in the Hootsuite dashboard. Sync up tagged content across both products to Integrate content from your Meltwater saved searches and tags into a Hootsuite stream.
Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage the audience, measure results, and more. Try it free today.
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