Your brand is everything. So are your competitors’. 

Keeping track of what people say about you and your competitors online is pivotal to your online reputation management.

Check out these top online reputation monitoring tools to keep tabs on what people are saying about you and your competition. 

They say you shouldn’t care about what other people think about you. And that’s true.

But not in business. 

You should definitely care about what people are saying about your brand. You should also care about what people are saying about your competitors.

This is because we’re long past the pre-internet age, when the vast amount of information about you wasn’t publicly available. These days, once something is said online about you, it’s on the internet forever. And others can see it. 

By keeping track of the conversation, you can stay on top of your online reputation, which assists with your online reputation management.

This could include monitoring online reviews to productively address harmful statements, and take actions to reduce negative comments more generally. You can gather a general sense of what your customers like about your product or service, and then use these insights to communicate your strengths on various marketing channels. Negative reviews, on the other hand, can shed light on the areas you can improve on.

Monitoring online reviews also aids with your competitive intelligence, as you can gather all kinds of insights about your competitors' brand perception.

If your competitor lacks in a certain area that your customers seem to value, how do you measure up in comparison? If you excel in this area, it's a strategic tip on how to position your brand online. You can communicate your competitive edge through various marketing channels.

Monitoring your competitors' brand online -- their strengths and weaknesses -- helps you know how to leverage your product or service in an advantageous way.

But how can you possibly keep track of every comment or question posted about you online? About your competitors? 

Online reputation monitoring is hard -- when doing it manually

The reality is that you can’t manually track all the online mentions of your own company, better yet your competitors', too.

That’s searching up review sites, industry specific review sites, social media platforms, Facebook reviews, news sites, Google reviews, and industry news outlets to check for negative and position reviews.

The internet is too vast. You couldn’t pull off a reputation management strategy through manually checking out the conversation, at scale.  

But you can with an online reputation monitoring tool. And, luckily, there’s a variety of paid, freemium and free tools online that can make online reputation management much easier. 

And by allowing you to keep tabs on what's said about your competitors, many online reputation management tools double as competitive monitoring tools, too. 

The following top online reputation monitoring tools help you gather a general sense of your brand's online presence, and how you can improve your brand's reputation, accordingly. They gather online reviews from major review sites, social media, online conversations, industry news and social mentions so you can understand of your brand's reputation and develop a strategy to improve it.

Check out some of the top online reputation monitoring tools so you can stay on top of your reputation management.

Top Online Reputation Monitoring Tools

1) Visualping 

Visualping is a popular website monitoring tool that can be easily used as a reputation management tool.

Visualping monitors any websites on the internet for changes. When a change is detected, Visualping sends you an automatic email alert, which includes a screenshot or text snippet of the change. All the changes are highlighted, making it easy for you to see where the change is on the page.

Visualping can be used as a reputation management tool by monitoring new reviews on review sites, social media and news sites, as well as your brand's visibility in the search rankings.

It's strategic to monitor your own and competitors' positioning in the search results because over 90% of customers use search at every stage of their customer lifecycle. This is SEO change monitoring.

Visualping also doubles as a competitive intelligence software, to monitor your competitors' reputation by tracking new bad reviews, positive comments and visibility in the search rankings. Monitor social media for insights on how your competitors respond to negative comments, and customers' general perception of their brand.

With Visualping, you can monitor Facebook pages and Instagram profiles to do so. 85% of customers use social media channels to discover and decide whether to make a purchase.

Getting started with Visualping is easy. You simply copy and paste the URL of the URL you want to monitor in the search engine on its homepage. Adjust your monitor settings, such as how frequently you want the page checked for changes, the area of the web page you want checked, the specific monitoring mode and the email address you want the alerts sent to.

For higher frequency monitoring, Visualping offers several affordable subscription options to choose from.

2) SentiOne

SentiOne is a social listening and online reputation management software that helps you monitor, analyze and react to whatever people are saying about your brand online. 

The idea is you can find and cultivate meaningful connections with your online audience. 

Their solution is based on an online listening technology that gathers a wide variety of information from the internet. The tool helps you discover actionable insights to improve your online reputation management. 

The technology helps entrepreneurs monitor the online activities of their current and potential clients, in real-time, and engage in online discussions from their tool. 

3) Reputology 

Mostly for small businesses and enterprises, Reputology is a review monitoring and online reputation management platform.

The idea is that you can transform online reviews into tools for growth.

You can monitor reviews, get automated notifications and measure your performance. You can track, respond to and analyze your brand's reputation, through keeping an eye on your online reviews.

The app lets you track reviews for many locations, such as restaurants, hospitals, auto dealers, hotels, retail stores, marketing agencies, consultants, etc, so you can capture your general online image and improve it. 

You can monitor business reviews published in many major review sites and social media platforms, including Yelp, Google and Facebook Reviews.

4) ReviewPush

ReviewPush is all about making managing your business reputation easy in the sense that you don’t have to stress about missing reviews and lagging behind what people are saying about you. 

A cloud-based online review monitoring and online reputation management software for small to midsize enterprises, ReviewPush collects all of your reviews in one location. Key features include multi-site monitoring, response options and multi-level reporting.

The idea is you don't have to jump through numerous hoops with countless logins just to catch a glimpse of what your customers are saying about your own brand.

You can easily conduct daily monitoring of review sites like Google, Facebook and Foursquare. ReviewPush integrates with Buffer, TripAdvisor and more. 

On one dashboard, you can view reports gathered from different locations, and get automatic reports at the corporate, regional, district and store level. 

You can get aggregated reports of all reviews, and monitor your performance over a specified period by getting your ratings analyzed.

The multi-store review tool helps firms generate positive reviews, and the email response feature allows you to reply to reviews. Additional features include missing profile alerts and social media monitoring.

5) YouScan

YouScan is an AI-powered social media intelligence platform with industry-leading image recognition capabilities.

You get immediate access to customer online conversations happening online, enabling enterprises and agencies to listen, analyze and turn social data into action.

Sentiment analysis, trends detection and smart alerts are combined into one intuitive dashboard, allowing users to easily fulfill complex reputation management tasks.

Besides powerful analytics, YouScan also features Aina, which is a virtual AI-powered data analyst that automatically delivers insights and alerts about customer's online reviews and conversations on social media.

YouScan also provides market-leading image recognition capabilities, called Visual Insights. They include brand logo detection, scenes, objects, activities, persons, and other photo contents analysis and reporting.

The platform serves over 600 customers worldwide, including well-known consumer brands and agencies, such as Nestle, L'Oreal, Chanel, PepsiCo, Google, Coca-Cola, Samsung and McDonald's, among others.

It’s recognized by industry experts as a leading player in the social media intelligence space: Gartner named YouScan a "Cool AI Vendor for Marketing" and MarkTech Breakthrough Awards 2020 recognized us as "Best Social Media Monitoring Software." 

6) BrandMentions  

BrandMentions is also great for monitoring your brand's online presence. It digs at every corner of the internet to find all the positive comments, negative reviews and general online mentions about anyone or anything.

You can get instant access to brand mentions across social media, news, blogs, videos and more.

You can also create alerts that are real-time on any brand or topic, sentiment analysis, perform efficient web and social listening, schedule white-label reporting and unveil competitors' marketing strategies. 

7) GatherUp

GatherUp is all about incorporating your reviews and customer feedback into the backbone of your business. 

Formerly GetFiveStars, GatherUp is a customer experience and online review engine that lets you gather insights about your brand online, helps you empower your marketing and convert customers. You can gather customer feedback and reviews in one location to help get more customers and drive sales.

GatherUp understands that more reviews and better star ratings help you harness the power of 3rd party online review sites to improve your website’s visibility and positioning in the search rankings.

GatherUp provides multiple ways to add 1st and 3rd party reviews to your website, the idea being you can turn your site into a sales funnel. You can build reviews on sites that matter to you, display reviews on your website, monitor review sites and easily add reviews to your website with Conversion Pop-Up.

7) ReviewsOnMyWebsite

ReviewsOnMyWebsite is designed to help businesses monitor, manage, and reply to online reviews on platforms like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

It lets you read and reply to all the reviews your business gets from one central location.

You can also use the software to generate more reviews for your business by sending automated email and SMS reminders to customers, and you can display the reviews on your site by using the Google reviews widget tool.

Top online reputation management tools: Conclusion 

Monitoring what people say about you and your competitors online will help you maintain a good reputation. You can build your business in a positive light, while also allowing you to quickly address any bad reviews before it escalates into something worse.

These online reputation management tools make it easy for businesses to track their own, and their competitors’, online image through tracking reviews and mentions online, in order to stay on top of their brand.

You can manually perform these searches yourself, but the internet is far too vast to stay on top of what’s being said about you and the competitor landscape.

These reputation management tools tools help you more easily and efficiently keep track of your brand, and turn these insights into actionable marketing strategies to help you cultivate a positive brand reputation.

Whether you want to maintain your existing reputation, repair a damaged reputation, or build your brand image from scratch, the tools have you covered. Simply choose the tool that works best for your brand. 

Happy reputation monitoring!