The social media explosion has been a boon to small firms trying to get a foothold with a larger audience. With that online exposure, however, there are sometimes unexpected results. An important part of creating an online presence is keeping tabs on how others online perceive your brand. Here are three easy ways to monitor your firm’s online presence.
Read Your Own Website
Just as some of us never check our own voicemail greetings, some firms build a webpage and never go back to see how it performs. If you haven’t read your own website since you last updated it, it’s time to get into the habit. Broken links and other webpage errors quickly give your firm a black eye with your potential audience.
Schedule regular visits to your website, or assign the job to someone in your firm. There are free tools such as one from Website Goodies that let you check all your links at once. Ensuring that your website always gets the reader where she wants to go should be the first building block in your strategy for monitoring your online presence.
When in Doubt, Google
Another important part of your online brand is what others are saying about you. Online search engines such as Google and Bing make it easy for potential clients to read online comments about your firm. Shouldn’t you know what’s being said, as well?
Your next tool for tracking your online presence should be a regular search of your firm’s name on the major search engines. You can set up Google Alerts to notify you when your firm is being discussed. Another easy-to-use tool is Google Reader, a news aggregator which collects specific headlines from syndicated web content into condensed reports for you to scan.
In the event your firm is mentioned in a negative context, you have the option of contacting them to do damage control. A good customer service strategy includes how online complaints will be handled. If you’re not tracking what others are saying, however, negative comments could be costing you potential new business and seriously damaging your online reputation.
What’s Your Social Media Reputation?
There are also great tools specifically intended to track what’s being blogged, tweeted and otherwise posted on social networking sites about your firm. Twitter Search can tell you instantly what’s being tweeted and you can set up an RSS feed to notify you. Pay services like Trackur will monitor your entire social media presence automatically. You can also set up RSS feeds at free services like Flickr and Digg to keep your finger on your social media pulse.
Your online reputation can either be one of your most important branding assets or a PR nightmare. Before you can respond to criticism or build on the recommendations of others, however, you must know what’s being said about your company online. Set up a system for regularly monitoring online comments about your firm. By doing so, you can successfully manage your company’s Internet presence.
Please check our Social Media Pricing, Reputation Management Pricing and Social Media A La Carte Pricing to choose the right social media strategy for your profile or business.