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.