Last Updated on February 25, 2024
When it comes to monitoring one’s internet reputation, there are a surprising number of tools available with which you can do so. More and more consumers are conducting searches on businesses before buying their products. Patients are searching for information about potential physicians before committing, and employers are searching for information about prospective hires before pulling the trigger.
Many people and businesses have unfavorable information that has surfaced about them on the internet without them realizing it, which can have negative consequences both personally and professionally.
We’ll cite five fantastic tools that will help keep you apprised at all times of what is being posted about you online so that you can do something about it if you so choose.
Reputation.com
This site offers tools that will monitor and report out on search engine results containing information about you or your business based on keywords you provide. It also offers robust services that will assist you in suppressing information you prefer not to have appear in top pages of search engine results.
Since most people (94% according to ) read only the first page of search results, you want to be sure that first page and all that it reports about you is as clean as a whistle!
SocialMention.com
Social Mention monitors over 100 different social media sites for information about you, and you can select specific ones to watch in a handy tool on the website if you don’t want to monitor all of them.
Social Mention has a very unique feature outside of its standard daily alerts on selected keywords. There is a widget called Realtime Buzz that you can download and add to your website to show real-time alerts on specific keywords, like your company name. That way, visitors to your website can see whatever kind of press and comments are being generated about you in a real-time manner across over 100 social media sites (assuming you would like for them to!). The social media site data pulled in includes everything from Twitter to Facebook to WordPress to Yahoo. You don’t even need programming skills to figure out how to add this widget to your site.
Google’s Me on the Web
Found on the Google Dashboard underneath your account information and similar to the tools already mentioned, this tool allows you to set up the information you want searched for and with what frequency. The “Deliver to” field allows you to indicate to which address you would like alerts emailed.
Brandify.com
This product uniquely offers a scoring mechanism based on your business’s brand presence online, which is really helpful, as it sets a benchmark of where your score is and should be. You can also run the exact same scoring report on your competitors in order to see how you stack up against their results.
One helpful feature of the product is that once the report is run and you get your score, you are then given recommendations about different social media sites to join as a business in order to improve your score.
Yasni.com
Yasni’s Expose product is another great monitoring tool that allows for up-to-the-minute monitoring of your reputation online. Yasni offers a free service that has basic offerings like monitoring your appearance in Google and other search engines, but then also has two additional tiers with enhanced options. For instance, Yasni’s Premium services are great for HR professionals who seek to monitor multiple people or competitors, and provide regular PDF reporting on search requirements.
The five reputation monitoring tools mentioned here are the ones we have found to be the most successful at monitoring what is being said about an individual or business online, and in providing clear and frequent reporting on the information found. Each of the tools mentioned offers something unique that the others don’t, so considering using more than just one of the tools.
In general, it’s a good rule to consistently monitor your personal and business reputations online–you never know when the moment might arise when a negative piece online that you weren’t aware of could have its irreversible consequences.