Monitoring your brand mentions and knowing your online reputation is extremely important. Not only does this apply to people who use their personal name as their business, but also for the name of your business, website or blog. For example, my personal name and blog have become a brand itself over the past several years.
My name is “Zac Johnson” and my site is ZacJohnson.com, so this makes it easier for me to track the brand and monitor both my site and my personal name.
There are plenty of ways for you to monitor mentions of your brand names online, but many of them will end up taking too much time and effort on your part, especially if you are tracking multiple brands or site names.
One of the most used ways to looking up your personal and brand names online is by doing a simple Google search. The problem with this is that many of the search results are skewed from your previous search results and cookies that might be on your browser. The other issue is that search results are changing all the time and who wants to continually visit the search engines to see if there have been any movements.
Four Tools To Monitor Your Brand
Instead I have four different tools that you can use for free (some are free trial, then premium based). These tools will allow you to monitor, track and improve your brand mentions and reputations online.
The best way to manage your online reputation and brand is to dominate the search results and by keeping a close eye on where your search rankings are, who is talking about you and what your competition is up to.
In the examples below I will use each of the services to monitor/track the name “Zac Johnson” and will show you how each work different.
Trackur
Created by one of the legendary masters of online reputation, Andy Beal, Trackur has become one of the most sought after and used monitoring systems online.
As mentioned on their site, they currently have over 70,000 customers using their platform, which is quite amazing in itself! Once you get to take a look at their platform for yourself you will see why. You can sign up for a free 10 day trial account without the need for a credit card at signup. Trackur allows you to check brand name and personal mentions across a ton of web sites and social platforms. Once logged into the system you can also select your preferred monitoring settings across the major social networking platforms, blogs, reviews, geographic targeting and more.
UPDATE: One of the tools originally listed in this post is no longer available. Good news is that we replaced it with something even better:
Buzzsumo Alerts
Create a content alert in Buzzsumo for your website url, your name or your social profiles. “Be the first to know when your brand is being discussed online. Brand Mention alerts track mentions of your brand, notifying you whenever your brand name is used in articles or content on the web.” Buzzsumo is a content marketer's secret weapon that can be used to monitor trending topics, do competitor research, measure the reach of your social media marketing efforts and so much more. Here's more about how to use Buzzsumo to track your brand mentions.
Knowem
How many times have you registered with one of the major social networks only to find out that someone already has your username? Not only is this a huge pain, but it's also quite disappointing! Now you have to think of a new name and also check to see if your name is taken on all of the other major social networks. If you were to do this manually it would take forever. Knowem does an awesome job on searching all of the social sites out there and seeing if your name is available or not. You can then register your own name through the social site or pay a premium rate and Knowem can complete the process for you across 300+ different sites!
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the most well known tools and is 100% free. The only problem with Google Alerts is that it really only delivers results that are indexing in their search results. However it's a very cool program for anyone that is just looking to occasional mentions of their brand or site name. Google Alerts also provides some nice settings such as notification delivery right into your email and can be setup for daily/weekly updates and you can add in as many keywords as you like.
What are people saying about your brand?
As you can see, there are plenty of monitoring tools out there and that is because it's important to know when and where your personal and business brands are being mentions. It can take years to grow your online brand and reputation to what it is today, but only a simple tweet or mention on a high profile blog or web site can ruin it in a matter of minutes.
It doesn't matter how big or small you think your brand is, you should always be monitoring what other people are saying about you. Use these recommended reputation management tools and get ahead of the competition and have better control over your brand.
Hey Zac,
You have mentioned some awesome tools here. I know about brand.com and the Google Alerts. I will check out the other 2 in this post.
Branding yourself these days is a must if you want to make an impact online and also for your blog as well.
Thanks for the tools and thanks for the contribution as well.
Thanks, glad you are already familiar with a few of them. I always like to try and setup as many as alerts as I can across multiple platforms so I get notified of some posts/content that other places might miss.
Hi Zac,
Really you give killer tool for monitore brand.I was not aware about first three and now i added these tool in my to do list.thank you zac for sharing your experenice with us.
thank you for sharing such a informative and nice post with all of us. all the four tools you have mention for monitoring our brand are really good specially the last one google alert . you are doing a great job by posting this type of post
Thanks, I’m glad you liked the post! I wanted to make sure I provided enough resources so at least one of them would be new to everyone.
Hey Zac and Ileane,
Oh wow! Great list! Until date, I am only using Google Alerts and that is working pretty well for me. Yes, even though I was hoping for a more flexible tool 🙂
Thanks for the great share and will definitely take a look at it soon!
Google Alerts is a good tool, but it still misses a lot and doesn’t cover anything on social.
Thanks for including Trackur in your list!
No problem!
Zac, thank you for the great post I am techie so learning about new tools is always cool to me. I have been using knowem and google alerts for some time. But the other two tools I have not heard of … I will check them out right away.
Cool, Knowem is a pretty good one too. Great for making sure you have all of your social profile urls registered.
so far from the point above, i’m just using google alert. For brand, it need the best domain name to be known easily
Hello Zac,
I found this tool → SocialMention (http://socialmention.com) to be quite helpful, which helps me monitor my brand through various social platforms with addition to “Sentimental analysis”.
Thanks for sharing these killer tools 😀
Happy Blogging!
Hi.. Zac Sir
Nice to See your awesome Tracker list .
today i was try that links and Get Suitable result.
And your Name is also Know as a Keyword :p
I was searched and Awesome result dear.
These tracker are working Cool! and Really easier faster and Smarter For every user.
And My New Blog’s alexa Rank is Not good But Getting Bit Good Traffic from Organic source.
thanks Zac Sir to share this Helpful Tracker list and About it’S functions.
Feeling Crazy. 🙂
Hi Zac! I have just started playing around with Brand.com and am very impressed so far. My challenge is staying away from every shiny new toy out there. This one so far though looks to be worth the time. From what I see, it offers a few things others do not.
Thanks again!
Excellent! Keep in touch and let me know if I can help with anything.
Hi Zac !
From this entire list , am only aware of Google alerts . I have read a lot of positive reviews on google alerts and wold love to try it out when i start an online business . I haven’t heard of the other tools you’ve mentioned and i’ve noted a few of them . Am sure they’ll be useful for me too . Thanks for sharing the details with us .
-Pramod
Zac, thank you for sharing these – I’ve only used Google alerts and Social Mention. I will be checking these out and seeing which works best. These types of tools are really essential to any online business or bloggers to know what’s happening online for their brand and marketing efforts.
Hi Zac,
Thanks for sharing such a huge resource of tools to help make our life easier. Right now, I only use Google Alerts.
I was completely unaware of all the others. I will have to check some of the others out to see which ones are easy to use.
Anyone who has a website online should be taking the time to monitor their brand and their name. We have to know what is being said about us. Thanks for sharing, have a great day.
Great tools to check out. I like knowem as it tells you almost all the names available for you to create. Google alerts are great too, I have entered my name and if I get mentioned somewhere I get an alert.
Hey Zac,
There’s something funny here, my name is Gilbert Samuel and I decided to create my selfnamed domain name couple of days ago (gilbertsamuel dot com) before does it before me.
Once upon a time I did a google search of my name, yup and a facebook search too and to my surprise, I saw millions of Gilbert Samuels, I haven’t used any of these tools but for a good insight, will my domain name filter it or will I always get an alert even if it’s not my Gilbert Samuel.
I’m sure you understand what I mean, I’m quite new to it, dropped this comment from mobile and I’m just lazy to check those sites, I won’t do that until I switchh to PC.
Hello,
From the list i’m just using goggle alerts which is great, and the rest of tools are totally new to me, i’m gonna use them soon.
thanks
Hi Zac,
That is great resource for us. Thanks for bringing such a nice topic. Now I clearly set my goals on that only so that I will be the brand in future. I personally like your message which you are trying to give we bloggers.
Thanks for nice information…
Great article, Zac!
Very useful tools. I would suggest trying something dedicated for real-time internet monitoring as BRAND24. Easy to use, efficient, and affordable tool for social listening. Recommend trying!