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Effective online reputation management requires observation, speed and data selection. To succeed online, you need to listen to what your customers are talking about, monitor what your competitors are doing, and predict where your industry is going. Although this may seem overwhelming, mention tracking is a quick way to overcome all of these challenges.

With this article, I will walk you through 7 reasons to monitor mentions, and actionable tips for effective online reputation management using mention tracking. In detail, you will learn how to:

Use Your Competitors’ Best Practices Get Insights From Your Customers Find Influencers and Ambassadors for Promos Evaluate Your Campaigns’ Effectiveness Quickly Discover New Industry Trends to Follow Prevent Crises Find User-Generated Content

Keep in mind, the starting point for monitoring is to fine-tune a tool that will help you to find mentions online.

To save you hours of tedious work and help you to achieve all the goals listed above, we created the Brand Monitoring tool, which has grown into a powerful online reputation management solution that tracks mentions on forums, Twitter, Instagram and the Web in general. Setting up the tool will take you 1-2 minutes.

Most mention monitoring tools work with keywords, and a keyword type fully depends on your final goal. Read on and check the infographics below to find out what to track in your specific case.

When you are ready, first go to the Brand Monitoring tool and type in your keywords.

If needed, narrow down your search by including or excluding additional keywords. Then select up to 10 countries (available for Guru and Business) you would like to track your mentions in. Finally, you can opt to receive an email report at a given time, but we will get back to that later. You can filter a specific language anytime after the mentions are collected.

Now, let’s move to reasons to monitor mentions and actionable tips to empower your brand online.

Tip 1: Use Your Competitors’ Best Practices

Tracking your competitors’ mentions will help you to understand what works for them and apply their best practices for your brand. Start with checking the most popular resources and authors talking about your competitor, and reach out to them to tell them about your products or services.

Here is how you can do it using the Brand Monitoring tool:

Set up two campaigns — the first one for your brand, and the second for your competitor’s brand. Go to the ‘Statistics’ tab to compare the overall number of your competitor’s mentions against your brand’s mentions within a specific time period.

Scroll down to ‘Top Domains’ to find websites that mention your competitor and don’t mention your brand. Pay special attention to those that put backlinks to your competitor’s website by switching ‘Mentions’ to ‘Backlinks’ on the top left. Study each source and check its monthly traffic to find the most authoritative sites.

To find relevant forums and influencers, go to the ‘Mentions’ tab and select ‘Forums’ on the top left.

To find relevant social media influencers, go to the ‘Mentions’ tab and select ‘Instagram’ or ‘Twitter’ on the top left.

Tag mentions from preferred resources and authors so that you can find them quickly later using filtering by custom tag.

Tip 2: Get Insights From Your Customers

By monitoring what your customers are saying about you, you can better relate to them and so see how your brand is viewed from their perspective to find out what they love, hate or feel is lacking in your product. Their conversations will give you valuable insights about what can be improved in your product or changed in the way you communicate with your customers; this will also allow you to create more detailed buyer personas.

Using Brand Monitoring allows you to:

Assess your overall mention sentiment — compare the positive vs. negative mentions numbers in the ‘Overview’ tab. Click on each sentiment type to see filtered mentions one by one.

See your brand/product associations by searching for a particular word next to your brand using the ‘Mentions’ tab.

Add tags to the selected mentions, like ‘new feature’, to get back to them later.

Tip 3: Find Influencers and Ambassadors for Promos

Among the most authoritative industry influencers, you can find those who talk about your competitors and those who are not fully on your side. It is a great opportunity to turn them into your brand ambassadors and improve your brand positioning online. Start by reaching out to them with a good pitch to give them or to change their mind about your brand.

Here’s how you do it using Brand Monitoring:

Check an author’s number of followers on Twitter, and also see the number of their posts in a forum where they have an influence.

Check on Instagram the profile of an author who has mentioned you.

Add their mentions to favorites to reach out to them later.

Tip 4: Evaluate Your Campaigns’ Effectiveness Quickly

To assess how successful your PR or online marketing efforts are, check your overall coverage and the mentioning resources’ authority. By monitoring mentions, you can also see if you are in line with your set campaign goals, which will help you develop better strategies in the future.

Using Brand Monitoring allows you to:

Check the campaign’s overall reach (=number of mentions), the estimated reach of each mention, and the number of backlinks in the ‘Overview’ tab. Switch between Web, Forums and Instagram Overview data to see the whole picture.

While looking through each mention using the ‘Mentions’ tab, pay attention to the monthly traffic of a mention source, the top forums that mentioned you, and the number of comments or threads discussing your brand.

Filter mentions by negative/positive sentiment so that you can see your potential customers’ reaction to your message.

Export the data and create a report of your results.

Tip 5: Discover New Industry Trends to Follow

Keeping up with trends is what keeps businesses alive these days. Industry topics monitoring allows you to predict where your industry is going and get ahead of your competitors. Research the latest trends to find out if your potential or present customers see value in them. This will give you new ideas for blog posts and help you spot potential opportunities for future marketing campaigns.

This is what you can do using Brand Monitoring:

Spot spikes in the number of mentions for a particular topic, especially on forums and social media. The spike tells you that a topic has gathered steam online, which can play into your hands and contribute to your upcoming PR campaign around a trend.

Add a custom tag to the most insightful mentions to get back to them later.

Tip 6: Prevent Crises

Constant mention monitoring allows you to identify a potential crisis involving your brand before it becomes a scandal. If you react quickly and accurately, you will be able to mitigate damage and even earn extra points of respect for your brand. You have to focus on negative comments and reviews, and Brand Monitoring will help you with the monotonous search and filtering.

Here is how you do it:

Keep an eye on your overall mention sentiments every now and then, and compare positive mentions against negative ones with the ‘Overview’ tab.

Filter your mentions by negative sentiment, look through a resource’s authority and, if required, take action immediately — reach out to people.

Set alerts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to receive mentions on time and manage negative comments via email.

Tip 7: Find User-Generated Content

User-generated content is important for your brand, as it boosts your online reputation, builds a community around your brand, and positively influences people’s choice of buying your product. You should always track and analyze mentions, channels and sentiment to benefit from it by integrating it into your content strategy. 

Instagram is one of the top channels for finding visual user-generated content you should look after. However, finding it is quite challenging considering the amount of data — 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram daily. Here’s how you find user-generated content on Instagram using Brand Monitoring in a click: go to the ‘Mention’ tab and select Instagram. Then filter your mentions by positive sentiment.

It’s important to track discussions on forums to spot use cases and user reviews that you can promote or place on your landing pages. To find this content, go to the ‘Mentions’ tab, select Forums, and filter your mentions by positive sentiment.

The most effective way to find user-generated content is tracking mentions on the Web in general. Pay special attention to blogpost or podcasts created by experts. This type of content will bring more visibility to your brand and new partnership opportunities. To spot this content using Brand Monitoring, go to the ‘Mentions’ tab, select Web, and filter your mentions by positive sentiment.

Don’t forget to thank the author for sharing their content publically. If you want to use or republish this content, remember to ask their permission first.

Online reputation management is not a piece of cake, but consistency makes it more effective and easier. Develop the habit of tracking mentions on a regular basis and keep in mind your goal for doing so.

But that is not all! We have prepared a concise checklist containing these 7 actionable tips to help you improve your online reputation management. Use the banner below to download and print it.

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