The Nine Best Reputation Management, RSS, and Social Search Tools

Revised January 25, 2021
~~Revised October 25, 2019~~

The explosion of blogging, social media, and online review sites has provided brands with unprecedented opportunity for exposure through authentic customer advocacy.

But this proliferation of (often unfiltered and unvetted) content presents significant risks for brands as well. Marketers need to constantly be on the watch for fake reviews, trolls, and unanswered customer complaints.

Social media monitoring tools are an excellent first line of defense for tracking brand mentions, and in some cases brand sentiment as well, from sources across the web.

But to make sure nothing gets missed, marketers often deploy a second layer of tracking tools. Here are nine of the best tools for monitoring your brand, key topics, influential bloggers, focused news sites, and obscure social media networks.

Reputation Management Tools

1) Reputation.com
Google Review Count: 312

Manage, monitor, and track your name, business or brand’s online reputation across online reviews, business listings, and social media to improve customer service and encourage advocacy. Conduct customer surveys, create reports and analyze results.

Sample review: “Reputation.com…allows you to view search engine results and select if a result is positive, negative, or not you…you have access to the top 20 links, plus you are given the top 20 links for both Google and Bing. Another key feature that Reputation has is the MyPrivacy tool. This tool will notify you if any of your private data that you wish to not have exposed, is in fact exposed.” — The Social Media Hat

Pricing: contact vendor for pricing

Showcase reviews: The Social Media Hat

2) BrandYourself
Google Review Count: 192

Tools to help businesses and individuals track and managage their online presence; get more control over search hits and supress negative results. The company offers technology, resources, and (if necessary) services for online reputation repair.

Sample review: “BrandYourself offers a great way to view and manage search engine results about yourself…Once your (social) profiles are connected, you are given a score as well as a list of suggestions on how to improve your score. Improving your score will actually boost your link in search engine results…You are also given a profile that is always SEO ready and will improve your results.” — The Social Media Hat

Pricing: contact vendor for pricing

Showcase reviews: The Social Media Hat

Online Topic Monitoring

1) Google Alerts
Google Review Count: 418

Enter any word, phrase, brand or product name, or boolean string, and Google will send you periodic email updates of all mentions it finds. Set up multiple alerts to track different topics and brands.

Sample review: “Maybe it’s me, but Google Alerts seems popular with journalists and publicists but rather unknown to the rest of the world. That should change because Alerts is probably the best way to track any topic…Alerts are easy to set up, simple to manage, and Google will push them to your email whenever you like.” — iMedia Connection

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: iMedia Connection, Kissmetics, Shift Communications, The Social Media Hat

2) TalkWalker Alerts
Google Review Count: 227

Free, easy alert tool: enter any search phrase or brand/product name, specify the types of results to track (news, blogs, discussions, or everything), set you preferred language, and select how frequently you’d like to receive alert summaries.

Sample review: “Combine a blog reader with a coverage monitoring service like…Talkwalker Alerts…to make sure you’re staying on top of client news.” — Shift Communications

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Shift Communications

RSS Readers

1) Feedly
Google Review Count: 224

Create a curated stream of news and posts from any number of RSS feeds, including publications; blogs; YouTube channels; topics, competitors and brand mentions (through Google Alerts); and internal business content. Organize content into collections, search within your feeds, and share selected posts to major social networks.

Sample review: “I love Feedly for several reasons (including) its beautiful and clean magazine-type layout, and the seamless integration with Buffer…Feedly is a cloud based RSS aggregator and reader that is available for web browsers and mobile operating systems. For someone like me who spends a considerable amount of time scanning the web for shareable content, a reader like Feedly is a must.” — Rebekah Radice

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Anders Orsander, ArCompany, BuzzBlogger, Entrepreneur, Katie Lance, Marketing Insider Group, Maximize Social Business, Rebekah Radice, Shift Communications, SmartBug Media, Social Media Today, StoreYa Blog

2) Digg
Google Review Count: 183

Digg Reader is a tool for keeping up with sites and blogs. Enter a site or blog you like or browse categories to discover relevant content.

Sample review: “Digg is my go-to RSS reader and social bookmarking tool.” — PR Daily

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: PR Daily

3) Feedspot
Google Review Count: 124

Feedspot is a modern RSS Reader. If you’re trying to keep up with news and content on multiple web sites, there’s no need to visit each of those sites to check for new content. Feedspot allows you to put all of your reading in one location.

Sample review: “(One of the tools) I can’t live without when working (is) Feedspot.com – (an) RSS reader, I pay for the gold level. Privately aggregates webpages by keyword and domain.” — Robbie Richards

Pricing: free or contact vendor for gold level pricing

Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards

Social Search Tools

~~1) Social Mention~~
Google Review Count: 358

Sadly no longer active, Social Mention was a real-time social search engine that finds mentions of brands or topics acrosss blogs, social bookmarking sites, videos, and online forums, plus more than 100 social media properties including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, and Google+.

Sample review: “This tool has lots of cool features that focus on blogs, video, and social (all the ‘cool’ stuff). You enter in a search term, either a keyword or a company, and the tool will tell you what’s being said about that term across blogs and social platforms.” — Kissmetrics

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Catherine Pham/SlideShare, Lilach Bullock, Kissmetrics, MarketingLand, Perception System, RazorSocial (Technology), SnappApp, Visually

2) Whos Talkin
Google Review Count: 144

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding topics, keywords, products, or brands. The tool’s search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

Sample review: “Find out what people are saying on social media about any given subject, by simply entering your keywords in the search bar.” — Lilach Bullock

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Lilach Bullock

More Tools

Inoreader
Google Review Count: 162

Inoreader pulls in content the minute it’s available. Subscribe to RSS Feeds, Blogs, Podcasts, Twitter searches, Facebook pages, or email newsletters! Get unfiltered news feeds or filter them to your liking. Use Rules to set-up entire workflows such as sending push notifications and emails or marking as read when certain criteria are met. Use active searches to create a search query and all posts mentioning that query will be delivered as a news feed.

Pricing: free; $20/$50 per year; enterprise pricing by quote

Binary Fountain
Google Review Count: 82

An online reputation, listings, and employer brand management tool specifically for healthcare providers and multifamily residential property management firms. Features include analytics; review and listings management; and extensive social media management capabilities ( manage, schedule, and publish messages to multiple social media channels, monior 60+ million sites including social media platforms as well as news feeds, blogs, and forums).

Pricing: contact vendor

Social Searcher
Google Review Count: 79

Search for brand, topic, or keyword mentions across more than a dozen popular social networks. Filter results by sentiment and post type (link, photo, video). View a variety of analytics including sentiment by network, most active users/followers, and keywords associated with your brand. And that’s all free. With a paid account, get the ability to save history, view advanced analytics, and receive real-time alerts for brand or keyword mentions.