Reviews

Managing your online reputation is as crucial as ever for brand validity and awareness. What was once dominated by word-of-mouth referrals is now a smorgasbord of digital information that is publicly accessible. Access to your company’s industry ratings and client-customer reviews requires an internet connection from any device.

You must keep track of your online reputation to attract more clients and consumers. Even the slightest negative review can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s status in the industries you serve. As a business owner, any harmful statements about your products or services can turn away potential buyers. This can affect the number of leads you amass on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These leads may result in higher web traffic to your online stores, blogs, and websites; higher conversions result in greater profits and revenue for your business.

For protecting and preserving your online reputation, there is a range of paid and free tools on the internet. These apps can highlight the positive aspects of your business while reducing the negative sentiment left behind by bad reviews. We have compiled a list of the four best online tools for monitoring your online reputation in 2020.

1. Brand 24

Brand24 is a popular brand management tool that allows you to create projects that improve your online reputation. Each project is designed to track social mentions of your respective company or commercial entity. This platform has three paid tiers for media monitoring:

• Plus Package – $49/mo – this plan allows up to 5 users to track different keywords and mentions related to your brand. Data analysis, mentions, and citations are updated every 12 hours for your review. You also get in-depth tracking with a convenient mobile app; this lets you see who is trash-talking or leaving positive reviews for your company while on the go.
• Premium Package – $99/mo – the premium plan allows up to 10 users and a maximum of 100k mentions per month. You also get timely analytics that covers your daily social media reaches and specifics on who mentions you the most. Real-time compiled data can be exported to Excel files or PDFs for your convenience. There is also live assistance via chat, email, or phone 24/7.
• Max Package – $199/mo – the max plan allows up to 99 users and a maximum of 250K mentions per month. All data is updated in real-time, including tracking interactions and mentions. The max plan connects you with a brand management consultant who sets everything up for you with a precise analysis of the loads of data that flows in daily.

Brand24 crawls the entire web looking for mentions of your brands or companies. The tool stockpiles keywords related to your businesses and collect mentions from socials, blogs, videos, news sites, PR platforms, websites, discussion forums, Google reviews, and much more.

2. YouScan

YouScan is another popular social tracker that helps businesses’ tune into their customers’ online conversations. This social media intelligence platform is ranked number one among influencers, clients, and customers alike. As a media listening tool, YouScan scans the social platforms and web in search of your brand’s mentions and reviews. It analyzes Google reviews, industry citations, mentions, and other social gabs about your company. Here are some of its perks:

• YouScan scans social media and the web for all your brand mentions.
• It pinpoints data that you can sift through with user-friendly analytical tools.
• Customers can create search criteria with strategic keywords that are relevant to their brands. YouScan will scour the internet and collect data that match your searches.
• Its Visual Insights tool is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for accurate results, charts, and numbers that reflect your brand’s image and reputation on the web.
• This tool manages your brand reputation with actionable insights, texts, and visual media so you can see who is saying what about your company.

3. BrandMentions

BrandMentions digs every corner of the web to find relevant mentions about your brand or business. This platform uses the power of social media to help you make worthwhile, informed decisions about customer and client engagements.

This popular tool searches Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social platforms for mentions. It also scans blogs, review sites, news sites, and websites. While it might take some time to configure the tool as needed, BrandMentions is worth it, according to industry monitors. Each data return can be filtered accordingly. You also get a detailed breakdown of all mentions, reviews, citations, and even your competitors’ keywords for monitoring.

Using this tool is an ideal way to grow your pool of data. You can even respond to social posts directly from this platform’s user-friendly interface.

4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo makes this list for its excellent reviews and ratings. This tool takes a different approach to brand management and online reputation monitoring. It allows users to comb the internet for any content that relates to their search terms. The latter may include company names, brands, products, and even services within a specific industry or sector.

The platform delivers several search results that engage customers with real-time data and statistics. Customers can filter out searches using dates, countries of origin, B2B publishers, language, domains, and content-type. Similarly, they can check to see which publishers or influencers have cited or mentioned their brands within specific date ranges.

The brand management network provides engagement figures from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and other social or non-social platforms. You get a number of links per search result, as well as detailed graphs and charts. For effective online reputation management, the tool creates alerts for clients covering brand mentions, competitor mentions, keyword, back-links, and content from sites and blogs.

These are but four of the top online reputation monitoring tools in 2020. As always, you can check Google by simply entering your name or brand/company name to see mentions. However, an online tracker and tool provide detailed analysis and statistics that regular searches on engines cannot offer.

Everyone knows that local reviews can impact what a potential customer thinks about your business, but this study from BrightLocal reveals how consumers truly view local reviews.

Especially reviews that have been posted recently.

According to the study, 85% of consumers don’t really care about local reviews that were left over three months ago. In fact, 40% of consumers only take into account reviews that were submitted within the past two weeks.

The results of this study are very important because it suggests that old reviews, positive or negative, can have no bearing on your brand if they are more than three months old.

Here are some more interesting facts from this study.

Local Business Searches are Increasing

More consumers are now conducting searches for local businesses this year compared to last year.

• 27% of online consumers are regularly searching for local businesses, which is a percentage that has more than doubled from 2017.
• 69% of online consumers have searched online for local businesses monthly, which is up 54% from last year.
• 56% of online consumers searched for local businesses at least once a week, which is a 41% increase from 2017.

The study concluded that 18-34-year-olds are searching online for local businesses the most. More than half of them conduct a search every day, and 81% of them search every week.

This demographic is also reading the most reviews – 50% of 18-34-year-olds always read online reviews. Since more people are conducting online searches for local businesses, it stands to reason that more of them will read online reviews.

However, most consumers will only read about 4 online reviews from a local business. This means that your online reviews have a shelf life, whether they’re positive or negative.

Local Reviews are Still Powerful

Even in 2018, the influence of consumer reviews has never been more powerful. Check out these key findings on the influence of local business reviews.

• Positive reviews make a consumer 68% more likely to use a local business.
• Negative reviews make a consumer 40% more likely to stop in their tracks.
• 57% of consumers won’t use a local business with fewer than 4 stars.
• Consumers want to have more than 40 reviews before they trust the overall star rating.

Today, local business reviews can still make or break your business. While it’s no surprise that positive reviews can improve your chances of gaining a customer, this study is consistently showing that negative reviews can extremely deter a customer from even considering to do business with you.

Negative Reviews Can Now Be Tamed

Let’s face it. There isn’t a perfect business on the face of the Earth. Different customers have different user experiences, so every business likely has a few online reviews they aren’t proud of.

However, as time passes on, consumers will be more likely to skip over your negative reviews, or they won’t even read them at all if they are more than three months years old.

This just goes to serve as a reminder that time literally heals all wounds and that your reputation can manage itself over time.

If you’ve had a few negative reviews in the past, you can likely rest easy knowing that your potential customers won’t factor those into their decision to purchase your products or services.