Tools to help you maintain a Good Online Reputation
Goodwill matters in the world that we live in. In reality, nobody likes to mingle with people who are infamous or notorious in an attempt to avoid being cheated or victimized in a fraud.
Same is the case for virtual world as well. If a business or a person does not have a good reputation, it receives a far lesser number of prospects than it would have normally. The reason is clear: nobody wants to associate with a person or organization who are not good at what they do or have been popular for the wrong reasons.
A tarnished reputation need not be a result of poor business practices, sometimes your competitor plays a murky role by spreading rumours, negative content and hatred about you. If you are not aware of how to defend yourself, this strategy hits your business at the most vulnerable position, and makes it suffer at an unprecedented scale.
So, the question now arises: how can I maintain a good online reputation of my brand?
Well, ORM (Online Reputation Management) is a tricky process, but here are some tools that can help you:
Tool #1: Social Searcher
Website: www.social-searcher.com
The Social Searcher is a tool that is best used for knowing the sentiments that the audience has about your brand. It can be of the three types: positive, negative and neutral. Positive sentiment signifies that people connect with your brand optimistically and have good things to say about your brand. Negative sentiment, on the other hand, tells that the audience does not have nice things to say about your brand. They identify with your brand in a pessimistic way, probably affected by a customer service issue or a product quality flaw. Neutral denotes indifference: the audience neither voices positive opinions nor have any issues with your brand. They know about your brand, but they do not have any sentiment attached with it.
Now, the way sentiment analysis works is that ideally, the positive sentiment should always outnumber negative sentiment. It is always measured in ratios, like when I say that some brand has a sentiment analysis score of 16:1, that means that there are 16 positive opinions about the brand when compared with one negative opinion. The brand has an overall positive reputation, and it will grow.
But when it is said that a brand has a sentiment analysis score of 1:16, that means that it has one positive sentiment as compared to 16 negative sentiments. The brand will start moving into a downward decline spiral unless its reputation is managed properly.
Tool #2: Social Mention
Website: www.socialmention.com
Social mention has pretty much the same task as Social Searcher, this is a Sentiment Analysis tool that also identifies trending hashtags with your brand. Its interface is very plain and simple, and it does not boast of many functionalities. It is a sentiment analysis tool, and it does its job well.
In contrast with Social Searcher, Social Mention’s accuracy is higher, and it tends to identify sentiments in a longer range of time than what Social Searcher does (drawbacks of being a free tool, probably).
Tool #3: Brand 24
Website: www.brand24.com
Brand 24 is not a free tool. It is a paid tool that offers a free trial to test its services out. The range of services provided by Brand 24 is so good that it is almost a necessity for the people seriously interested in doing Online Reputation Management. Apart from doing Sentiment Analysis on a time period of almost a year, it covers a wide variety of platforms that you can select or deselect to view the mentions of your brand on platforms of your choice. There is a toggler you can use to see every positive/negative mention made in a year and perform corrective or repair action on them.
It has a wide variety of reporting features that you can use to fetch every kind of metric related to Online Reputation Management. It is a must have tool for organizations seriously seeking to manage their online reputation.