As a small business, your online reputation is always on your mind, particularly in a consumer experience-driven industry like property management. You need people to see you as the knowledgeable, reliable, and capable professional that you are—wherever they look.
Making positive impressions in person is a given, but so is maintaining your online reputation. People tend to flock to search engines first when they have a question or are looking to do business just about anyone (we all know this to be true). According to a 2019 survey, 90 percent of respondents said that positive online reviews influence their buying decisions.
It’s only logical then to keep tabs and push a proactive narrative of your company as you see it to see you’re well represented on social and review sites. Here are 9 online reputation management tools for property managers to do just that.
Tool #1: The Brand Grader
The Brand Grader, a free tool from Mention, is a prime place to start if you want to know how people are talking about you online. It will give you an overview of your online reputation through data points, such as where in the world people are mentioning you and on what types of sites.
You’ll also get a handle on which sites’ mentions have the biggest impact on your business, and whether the sentiments are positive or negative. You can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors’ reputation scores, as well.
Tool #2: Mention
Feedback and opinions can be shared in any number of places around the internet at any time. To track it all, you can upgrade to Mention’s more comprehensive subscription-based tool. It offers features like alerts when people name your brand on blogs, forums, social media, and elsewhere online. You can customize the tool to get the alerts that matter most.
Mention also provides you with analyses of how your brand is doing, finds relevant social media influencers for you to connect with, and allows you to check in on what your competition is up to.
Tool #3: BirdEye
Like Mention, BirdEye will send you review alerts so you can respond immediately to both negative and positive feedback on review and social sites. But beyond reacting to reviews already written, BirdEye helps you build your reputation online and centralize positive reviews through its own aggregator and an optimized website of your business.
You can also send review requests via email or SMS to customers to keep the flow of new positive reviews steady. And BirdEye Messenger allows you to chat directly with customers across social media, on your websites, and on Google.
Finally, it keeps your business listings consistent across more than 50 websites since the first step to a stable reputation is being findable.
Tool #4: Yext
There could be information about your brand posted across a wide range of sites, from Yellow Pages to TripAdvisor to Google Maps. Those listings can help you attract new customers, but only if the information on them is correct.
Yext helps you to find and manage your brand’s information online to ensure its accuracy and consistency, while saving you time. You can also add your details to sites where your company isn’t listed yet.
Tool #5: Reputology
Two important parts of managing your reputation are responding effectively to negative reviews and resolving issues promptly. Online reviews can give you useful insights into how your company is performing, helping you identify your successes and opportunities for improvement.
Those reviews, however, are scattered across the internet on sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Facebook, and industry-specific sites. Reputology gathers them all into one place so that you can review them and assess how your company is doing. You can also respond to them from the app.
Tool #6: KnowEm
To manage your online reputation, you need to make sure that you’re in control of all online accounts associated with your name. Often, though, brands find that someone else is using their name on various sites—in unauthorized ways. It’s necessary to keep tabs on all of these platforms, even the more obscure ones.
That’s where KnowEm comes in. You can use it to search 550 social sites, 150 domain hosts, and the USPTO trademark database for your brand name. KnowEm can also help you to claim your name on those sites and set up basic profiles so that you aren’t taken by surprise and others aren’t taking advantage of your name.
Tool #7: Brand24
Brand24 also helps you track mentions across a number of platforms, including social, videos, forums, news, and blogs. Not only does it alert you to mentions, it also performs a sentiment analysis of each mention. Using it, you can sort through the positive and negative mentions and respond to them immediately.
It integrates with Slack, so you can engage with reviewers right from your phone.
Tool #8: Hootsuite
And while we’ve mostly talked about reputation monitoring tools so far, you can’t forget about the elbow grease it takes to manage social media. There are so many social media platforms where you might want to have a presence, but wrangling them all can feel overwhelming. Hootsuite aims to simplify social tasks by gathering them into one place.
You can use Hootsuite to schedule social posts, curate content, monitor keywords that matter to you, and keep tabs on your social media comments and mentions. You can even respond to them from one inbox.
Tool #9: Buffer
Part of building an online reputation lies in creating an excellent customer experience. Beside publishing and analyzing social media posts, Buffer helps you manage online customer service requests that come through social. Through a shared team inbox, you can engage in conversations and resolve requests and issues across all the major social media platforms.
You can also assign conversations to team members, so the right person is answering your customers’ questions.
No matter how many units you manage, your company’s online reputation matters. Don’t let other people decide how your brand is represented on the web. Use these online reputation management tools for property managers to take control of what you can, and influence the rest.
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