Best apps to manage your online reputation at no cost
Everyone needs to worry about their online reputation these days. It could take one viral post or a bunch of critical reviews to sink your business or your brand and the amount of effort to recover from that could be potentially unbearable. However, there are a lot of websites, social media, and business listing directories in which you can get reviews, comments, and reactions so managing all of them can be a tough job for any business. Another thing to consider in terms of reputation management is how you rank in search results and if your content in social media is getting the best engagement.
No matter the size of your business, online reputation management and social media monitoring is something that has to be done. There are a ton of internet resources and tools to track your brand and business, but most of those tools require a monthly fee to work. So, this list presents several online reputation management tools available for free that will probably help your business to do online review management, handle negative reviews and perform well on your client’s preferred search engine, rank better in search results and even look at your overall reputation in real-time.
Maybe after seeing the results of trying one of these free tools, you will move forward to other paid online reputation management tools and try to improve your search rankings.
NiceJob focuses on three goals: get more reviews, referrals, and sales. This will be achieved by getting more positive reviews from your customers, converting visitors into paying customers, and making everything automated so you can take advantage of as much time as possible. Their tools will send smart reminders to customers to get positive reviews and then distribute those reviews across popular sites like Facebook or Google. Every customer can leave a review in 30 seconds or less. NiceJob will also help to gather data from your customer to win more leads and potential sales. The free access will guarantee: a lead generation microsite, reputation management, review monitoring, and track customer journey on your website.
Pros:
- Heavily focuses on building meaningful relationships and leads to gain sales.
- Comes in handy to collect and gather information from your customers.
- Most of the work is automated so you can handle it easily without a large team to process data.
Cons:
- Only reputation management software is free. You have to pay a monthly membership for the rest of the services.
- The automated process can bypass some reviews that need personalized attention.
- Don’t have listing management features.
While Mention may fall short in the review tracking aspect, it is a great start to study how your brand name and reputation is perceived online. With their online tools, you can monitor 1 billion sources across the web daily, including press articles, review sites, forums, and blogs. You can easily get and filter data from the most prominent social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. They also offer the possibility of drafting your content, schedule, and publish posts from multiple channels. Their free plan comes with the possibility to configure one alert (your brand name, for example) and get reports for up to 250 mentions over 3 preferred social media accounts. So it’s the perfect deal if you heavily rely on social media to get your brand known.
Pros:
- Great tool for brands that sell most of their products through social sites.
- You will get a comprehensive report of how your brand is perceived online, not only how it is reviewed.
- Allows you to adjust your content for those consumers who talk about your brand.
Cons:
- You can only configure one alert so if you want to monitor your brand and other products you will have to pay a membership fee.
- Doesn’t work to improve in search rankings.
- It’s an online reputation management software for media sites only
Pozative’s biggest claim is “free forever.” They are a text message application that gets reviews from your customers after they leave your business. You can sync up your accounts on Facebook, Google, Healthgrades, Vitals, Angie’s List, or RateMD accounts, and redirect your clients through text messages to execute reviews there. If your customer leaves a critical review, you will receive it directly to your email where you can follow up privately, not posted online. It is possible also to manage all of your locations on one platform and compare them. The free version only limits the number of reviews, invitations and locations that you can send/add but it’s a great way to get started to see how reviews monitoring works.
Pros:
- Includes a lot in its free version.
- Works with the major social platforms and listing websites.
- Cheap to migrate to the paid version, only $90 yearly.
Cons:
- Heavily focuses on text messages, neglecting other communications channels
- The free version limits review invitations to only 25 clients per month.
- The free version doesn’t allow CRM integration.
Rankur is a complete solution for media monitoring, management, and team workflow. It is helpful for brands, entrepreneurs, and even agencies. They will monitor social networks for you and capture opinions, alert you about reputation risk with their sentiment analysis tool, and signal valuable prospects and opportunities. They will also help to monitor blogs (yours or from your competitors) so you will be the first to know what appears in the digital news space. On the team workflow service, they offer the possibility of sharing drafts within teams, setting up approval profiles for content, and automated interactions with clients.
Pros:
- Great deal for a free service, helpful for businesses leveraging social networks.
- You will get a complete picture of how your brand is perceived socially and what people talk about.
- Provides meaningful insights about what to publish with their news spaces feature.
Cons:
- On the free plan, you can monitor only two social networks.
- On the free plan, you can only have 1 user access so the workflow service is useless.
- Doesn’t have review tracking among listing sites or online search engines.
While Google Alerts is not a proper online reputation tool as the other reputation websites listed here, you should consider setting up Google Alerts for your brand or product name. It is an easy (and free) start to monitor your reputation and at least see what people are saying about you. All you need is only a Google account and you are free to start.
Pros:
- Google is the most powerful search engine, so it’s guaranteed that you will get in your inbox every mention of your brand name.
- Monitors your rights reserved content, in case your product has some artistic value
- Easy to set up and cost nothing.
Cons:
- Basically a search alert with no extra value.
- The mails can be annoying and be difficult to handle.
- You will have to do all the insights and analysis for yourself.
