Sep 26, 2012

Tracking Your Business and Brand Online

Do you know when someone posts a poor review of your business on Yelp? What about if your competitor just published a blog article comparing their service to yours? If you aren’t currently tracking the mentions of your brand and business online, then you are definitely missing out on seeing information that has potential impact to your business, your customers, and your success. Monitoring your online reputation isn’t expensive or difficult, it simply takes a little effort to get set up once you know where to start. After you are tracking your brand and business, you may also find it useful to track competitors and other topics of interest. The most tried and true method of online tracking is to set up Google Alerts for the keywords that you are interested in. These keywords should include not only your business name and products, but also your domain name, your name, employees names, and other terms that relate to your business. When set up, Google Alerts will check regularly to see if there are new results for your alert searches. If there are new results, Google Alerts will either publish them to an RSS feed or send them to you via email, depending on your chosen preferences. You can change these preferences at any time and designate how frequently you get emails. It is just that easy; put in what you want to know about and Google will email you. Besides being free, you can create up to 1000 Google alerts and add or delete them at any time. In addition to monitoring your business, brand, and competitors, you may also want to create Google alerts for events of interest or to help track results of a PR campaign. If your email box is already too full and you aren’t a fan of RSS readers, Mention is another way to track your online reputation and is specifically created for tracking online mentions of your items of interest. Similar to Google Alerts, you create alerts for all the keywords that relate to your business, brand, and industry. Different from Google Alerts, Mention is a stand-alone desktop or Chrome application that you download, install and then manage and monitor your alerts in that application. Mention is free for up to 1000 alerts per month. Now that you have the tools, be sure to know what your customers and potential customers are "learning" about your business online. References: http://exciramedia.com/track-your-brand-with-google-alerts/ http://www.freewaregenius.com https://support.google.com/alerts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=28415&answer=175925&parent=28413&rd=2