Unlike many articles you may read about social reputation management; managing the reputation of your business across the “social” web is a little more complex than simply having a Twitter account. A lot of social reputation management comes down to internal education and ensuring the people who work for you are aware of your core values, tone of voice, and key messages that need to be portrayed (and this isn’t just confined to social media).
In order for you to appropriately action any of the bad (or good) things being said about you online, there are a number of tools that are now available to effectively monitor your social presence. Keeping an eye on brand, service, and product mentions is key to ensure nothing potentially slips under the radar, and escalates into a bigger problem. The sooner you can resolve any issues online, the less damage that will be caused – and you could even end up looking good in the process.
Here are 10 top tools to help manage your brand’s social presence:
TweetDeck is a fantastic Twitter tool, as it allows you to setup a dashboard-like view of different search volumes and brand mentions. This also carries with it the added benefit of allowing you to schedule tweets, post to Facebook, and it also has desktop, mobile and iPad clients.
Viral Heat is a very reasonably-priced alternative to some of the high-end social monitoring tools used by large brands, such as Alterian SM2. Once you have setup the terms you wish to monitor within the social networks, visual data is provided based on the quantity of mentions for blogs, forums and traditional social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Similar to Viral Heat, Trackur allows you to setup monitoring for a select group of terms that you enter (such as your brand name). A good feature of Trackur is that it allows you to mark the sentiment next to each mention (ie. positive, neutral, or negative) – which provides a good reference point when reviewing the data.
Billed as a “real-time social media search engine”, Social Mention allows you to get quick snap-shots of where you are being mentioned without having to create an account. It comes with the added benefit of allowing you to setup alerts should you need to, and you can also display embedded widgets on your blog if you wish to aggregate your mentions publically.
Moving away from the monitoring tools, Knowem allows you to check whether your brand name is available across 550 social networks. Once you have ran the check, you can either go through and manually register the accounts that are available (if you wish), or you can pay to let them set them up for you – which is a very useful service if you don’t have time to do it yourself.
Clicky Web Analytics is a real-time web analytics package to use on your website (similar to Google Analytics, but providing you with instant data). The benefit of this tool for managing your social presence is that you can instantly see if there is a spike of visitors arriving on your website from a specific URL or key phrase – allowing you to act on it if it is something negative.
The simplistic – and free – option offered by Google that allows you to setup a series of email alerts based on the search terms you enter. The good thing about Google Alerts is that it allows you to monitor blogs across the web, as many of the social tools simply focus on popular social networks.
If you’re looking for a tool to specific monitor mentions on Twitter, then Twazzup does a fantastic job of aggregating the latest tweets, top links, related influencers, and more. Twazzup provides the functionality of Twitter’s Advanced Search, but provides much more in-depth and insightful information to go with it.
IceRocket is a blog search engine, which provides a daily-sorted list of blogs based around a topic that you search for. The results returned by this are more accurate than Google’s Blog Search, as you can actually sort the results by “day published”, with accompanied “references” also included.
Raven provides a complete monitoring and reporting suite for website owners – which is much more than just a social monitoring tool. Encompassing a series of industry tools, you can setup a variety of website profiles in Raven, monitor social mentions, external linking activity, and create reports based on all of the data retrieved – which can be especially useful.
Obviously having a series of social tools is only half of the “battle”. You still need to have somebody to manage your brand’s social presence as part of your marketing, ensure people within your company are educated in the power and responsibility they potentially have online, and tie this all back to provide all-round good customer experiences.
The above was a guest post by PackNet, a UK-based business VoIP provider. Although not offering social monitoring services, PackNet provide the telecoms networks that enable customer service teams within businesses to communicate effectively.
