As the 'Net continues to become more and more social, there is a vast amount of digital destinations where customers can leave feedback about their positive and negative brand experiences.
Keeping track of this feedback, however, can be overwhelming for merchants. It is time-consuming to monitor feedback on one website, let alone on all the popular social networks and on the rest of the Web. Luckily, numerous tools make tracking conversations around a brand a more productive and actionable task, like these 10 reputation-monitoring tools for merchants.
Where is my online conversation coming from? Has my marketing campaign been effective? These are just two of the many questions that BrandsEye can answer for retailers, because users can choose from a wide range of metrics for their reporting needs (e.g. volume, sentiment, author credibility, etc.). Merchants can also define the conversation topics that they are interested in listening to.
With Trackur, users simply indicate what keywords they would like to monitor and the platform allows them to not only see the conversation, but also insights into who is behind the conversation. The platform scours millions of sources on the 'Net, including forums, blogs and a large variety of social networks to pass along that vital information. Merchants may also be happy to know that Trackur is fully brandable, meaning they can white label their social media monitoring dashboard (with select plans).
In addition to being able to manage local listings across the Web, this location-based platform provides a review-tracking feature for businesses. This function allows merchants to monitor the ratings and reviews that customers post within online listing sites. By having this data in one spot, merchants can decide if they need to take action to fix an issue, as well as compare their reviews with years past.
This local brand management platform provides chains and franchises with tools and analytics for understanding and improving a brand at the local level. Chatmeter comes with location-based analytics and competitive benchmarking so merchants can see how their brand compares with their competitors on the national, regional or store location level. Chatmeter also enables merchants to monitor and respond to customer reviews in one location, as well as understand the overall attitude of customer reviews with sentiment analysis.
More than 1 million people use Reputation.com to manage their online presence, including within the search results and online directories and reviews. Other key features of Reputation.com include the ability to learn what customers are saying about each individual location, and companies can get insights into what customers are saying about their competition.
While this isn't necessarily a reputation management platform, online retailers can create recipes to manage their online presence. For example, merchants can connect the feed channel to their inbox, and set a rule that requires IFTT to send an email alert every time a specific keyword mention happens on Twitter. This alert feature can quickly flood a user's inbox, however, so use it judiciously.
LocalVox is a local online marketing provider that can be leveraged to manage a business's local marketing channels. Aside from helping users communicate with customers through email, social and mobile, the platform also automatically monitors a user's social reputation. In fact, the platform makes it easy for merchants to monitor online chatter as users receive an email from LocalVox every time they need to respond to a Yelp or Citysearch review, Facebook comment or Twitter reply.
This free tool is simple to use, and while it may not be as robust as some of the aforementioned platforms, it can definitely be useful for monitoring online conversations about a brand, competitor or industry. Users simply need to type in a keyword or phrase into the search query box and filter the result preferences. Then, all alerts will be sent to the user's email address so they can stay up to date with all related Web activity regarding a specific topic.
Does more, to give you less is the idea behind Brandwatch. Retailers can build customized queries, so there is more relevance to the results they receive. Brandwatch crawls and stores Web data itself and uses multiple layers of spam filtering to ensure clean, high-quality data.
TweetBeep alerts companies when someone else is talking about them on Twitter, from the use of specific keywords, such as words related to a brand, product or competition. The platform provides users with hourly email updates, and can even be used to track replies and mentions. Tweetbeep is free, however, users can also purchase the premium version, which has no advertisements and provides a 15-minute alert option.
These are far from the only reputation monitoring platforms available on the 'Net. Share your brand's favorite reputation monitoring tools in the comments section below.