Today’s Top Personal Branding and Reputation Management Tools for Entrepreneurs and Startups
As Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos says, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Building and maintaining the reputation of a standout brand is one of the most daunting challenges faced by every entrepreneur and startup. Brand recognition is a key component to the success of any new business, but it takes time and strategic persistence for a company to flourish as an industry leader. Content shared with audiences online should deliberately establish the inspiration and vision for a startup. For entrepreneurs, cultivating a strong personal brand requires carefully curated content, on and offline, that expresses a recognizable identity to garner trust in the company and build confidence around the product or service. Luckily with the help of these top personal branding and reputation management tools, entrepreneurs and startups can effectively develop their reputation to entice talent, motivate investors and fortify brand loyalty efficiently.
HOOTSUITE
What is it?
Hootsuite is a social relationship management software platform that allows businesses to execute amazing reputation and brand management strategies across their organizations.
It is a Canadian based software company with offices located in San Francisco, Vancouver, Hong Kong, New York, Sydney, London, and Singapore. This is one of the leading platforms and is utilized by over 10 million users in 175 countries. Hootsuite helps users execute marketing campaigns, identify and grow their audience, and send targeted messages through multiple social platforms. Users can utilize its social media dashboard to collaboratively schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and other popular social sites with desktop, web, and mobile platforms. Hootsuite also allows users to seamlessly track industry trends and campaign results to alter strategies on the go. The Hootsuite dashboard has tabs that organize all the social profiles that you link with the application. Today, many businesses use their social profiles to improve brand awareness, provide customer support and reputation management, and motivate them to become repeat consumers of their products or services. Hootsuite easily manages multiple social profiles simultaneously.
What does it do?
The main reason to use Hootsuite for users to manage multiple social media accounts conveniently in one place, there is no need to have different passwords for each individual site platform which adds to the security of the business’s social accounts. With Hootsuite, users can post updates, connect with your client base, and review responses on over thirty-five popular social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and WordPress blogs with Events, Groups, Profiles, and Fan Pages. Hootsuite also connects the user with other platforms using third party apps including Vimeo, Instagram, Storify, Slideshare, Flickr, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Hootsuite has a wide selection of design themes that efficiently with social streams, columns, and tabs to improve user productivity by assigning messages, tracking progress and responses, and providing analytics to help steer the brand in the right direction. Hootsuite also enhances delivery efficiency by posting updates at the best time and date to maximize audience reach. Hootsuite collects useful market intelligence by tracking mentions of your industry, brand, and product, and search terms. Users can generate insightful social analytics reports by selecting from a range of templates and more than 30 report modules. Hootsuite can also produce custom reports to get data and insights on the metrics that matter to the user specifically.
What does it cost?
Professional — $19/month
Includes: 30-day free trial, 10 social profiles, Unlimited scheduling, 1 user, Bulk scheduling, Real-time analytics, Social sweepstakes, Unlimited RSS integrations
Team — $99/month
Includes: 30-day free trial, All Professional features, 20 social profiles, Unlimited scheduling, 3 users, Custom analytics reports, Team assignments, 6 contest templates, 1 Custom Branded URL, 1 social media certification
Business — $499/month
Includes: All Team features, 50 social profiles, Unlimited scheduling, 5 users, Analytic data exports, Publishing approvals, Premium app integrations, Custom Branded URLs, 4 social media certifications, 24/7 priority support, Extended training (60 mins)
Enterprise
Includes: Customizable features (Contact for custom pricing)
What’s the verdict?
Hootsuite is a go to application when it comes to managing social media accounts. It is useful for posting content on different platforms and monitoring the tweets, hashtags on social media, and is user friendly. Apart from scheduling content, it has a link shrinking feature which allows the user to shrink multiple links so that they can create more space. It is also compatible with mobile devices which means users can post videos from a phone or tablet to multiple social media platforms with ease. One of the biggest is it saves a ton of time with the scheduling feature. All users do is schedule posts and leave it to the system to post them automatically depending on the date or time I have indicated which improves workflow. The mobile application makes work flexible since users can post content when travelling. However, the scheduling feature does not work on all platforms, most notably Instagram, which means that users have to post content manually on Instagram for your followers to like or comment. This is slightly disappointing but it is not a major hassle. There is also a limitation on the size of photos that does not allow users to upload them on social media which hinders the quality of photos shared. Major brands like Visa, McDonalds, Porsche, EBay, and IBM all use Hootsuite to manage their reputation and grow their brand online.
SENDIBLE
What is it?
Sendible is a well-designed software that provides users with adept social media management. It is a business platform dedicated to monitoring and analyzing audience engagement which is useful to small, medium, and large businesses alike spanning a variety of industries. An interesting feature of Sendible is that it measures ROI from the same dashboard the user schedules messages and manages social networks. Sendible is an advanced, powerful platform that is designed to help grow a company through effective social media marketing. Depending on the package chosen, the user can involve 20 team members and manage over 350 services. The system is fully integrated with plenty of social networks and offers open APIs that allow the users to connect to as many services as they need. On top of that, Sendible offers packages for individuals, startups and established businesses or corporations.
What does it do?
Sendible allows the user to manage social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences, and measure ROI from an easy-to-use dashboard, allowing users to find prospects and drive leads through a sales funnel with its marketing automation tools and Social CRM. Sendible lets the user simultaneously post across multiple social networks from a single interface with a scheduling feature. The interface also provides in-depth analytics that gauge the effectiveness of posts with the audience. Sendible can handle numerous accounts making it an asset to users that work with multiple clients or contributors. Sendible improves workflow by assigning tasks to team members within in a few minutes. It is noted for having one of the simplest management interfaces on the market, allowing even the least tech-savvy users to work with it without much training. Sendible does not only engage the audience, it acts as a next-generation lead generator, and measures ROI in a flexible system which can grow with the business. Sendible is a powerful, customizable social media and brand management tool that can adapt to various business rules and procedures.
What does it cost?
Startup — $59/month
Includes: Free trial, Up to 30 services, Flexible Profile Grouping, Automation Tools, Report Builder, Google Analytics Integration, Up to 4 Branded Reports, 2 Team Members
Business — $99/month
Includes: Free trial, Up to 60 services, All Features from the Startup Plan, Team Collaboration Tools, Email Support, Up to 8 Branded Reports, 4 Team Members
Corporate — $139/month
Includes: Free trial, Up to 90 Services, All Features from the Business Plan, Workflow Features, Live Support, Up to 120 Lists, Up to 18 Branded Reports, 6 Team Members
Premium — $499/month
Includes: Free trial, Up to 360 Services, All Features from the Corporate Plan, Replace “via Sendible” on Facebook, Twitter & Google+, Dedicated Support, Unlimited Custom Reports, 20 Team Members
What’s the verdict?
Sendible is time saver that simplifies social media management. It can manage Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Pinterest all together. One of the best features of Sendible is how the user can repeat a social media share on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and arrange an end date, which saves time for social media scheduling. The user can schedule giveaways and blog posts for all year. It would better if Sendible offered the option to purchase more services or account add-ons without upgrading. For smaller businesses to add just one or two more social media accounts they must upgrade to the next tier, which may be too expensive. Companies such as Toyota, BBC Worldwide, and Sony Music all use Sendible as their go to social media and brand management platform.
RANKUR
What is it?
Rankur is a social media management tool that monitors online reviews, blogs, news, forums and social networks by measuring the quantity and quality of conversations, analyzing the demographic of an audience, and providing the user the ability to manage their social profiles and campaigns from within the platform-based engagement calendar. Rankur monitors and manages your online reputation to protect the users brand, personal name, CEO’s name and improves overall performance on the web. Rankur also helps identify leads and opinion leaders, and allows users to engage with online communities and track success.
What does it do?
Rankur uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies for sentiment analysis and opinion mining from free text. Their algorithms extract sentiment (positivity or negativity), selected topics, concepts and reviews from text in multiple languages online. The benefits of Rankur can be accessed through a web interface as well as a reputation management API. Rankur offer intelligent reputation monitoring alerts that help businesses efficiently manage their online reputation. Rather than receiving notifications of all data flow, users can filter notices to negative content, through our sentiment analysis system, detect and get warned of irregular spikes in volume, through our AI algorithms; they are also notified of warnings about online reviews and opinions as they appear on major online review sites, and can also filter all notices on the author’s influence to fine tune the number of received alerts in order to save time. Rankur scans more than 100 million web pages per day to extracts conversations, comments, articles and online reviews to understand the user’s audience and provide detailed analytic reports that display demographics split into language, sentiment, gender, age, location, and trends. Rankur also manages company pages by scheduling posts and responding to customers from one single place to improve your customer relationships.
What does it cost?
Free — $0/month
Includes: Real-time Monitoring, Multilingual Sentiment Analysis, Team and Client Collaboration, 1 Social Dashboard, 1 Saved Search with Unlimited Keywords, 50,000 Mentions/month, 1 User, 2 Social Profiles, Live Support
Business — $24/month
Includes: Real-time Monitoring, Multilingual Sentiment Analysis, Team and Client Collaboration, 2 Social Dashboards, 30 Saved Search with Unlimited Keywords, 100,000 Mentions/month, 1 User, 5 Social Profiles, Reporting, iAlerts, Group Searches, Custom RSS and Facebook Feeds, Live Support
Agency — $98/month
Includes: Real-time Monitoring, Multilingual Sentiment Analysis, Team and Client Collaboration, 10 Social Dashboards, 150 Saved Search with Unlimited Keywords, 10,000,000 Mentions/month, 3 Users, 30 Social Profiles, Reporting, iAlerts, Group Searches, Custom RSS and Facebook Feeds, Influence Analysis, API Access, Live Support
White Label — $298/month
Includes: Real-time Monitoring, Multilingual Sentiment Analysis, Team and Client Collaboration, Unlimited Social Dashboards, Unlimited Saved Search with Unlimited Keywords, 30,000,000+ Mentions/month, Unlimited Users and Clients, Unlimited Social Profiles, Reporting, iAlerts, Group Searches, Custom RSS and Facebook Feeds, Influence Analysis, API Access, Complete White Label, Live Support
What’s the verdict?
Considering the latest free reputation management software, Rankur is great for in-depth monitoring of social media sites, negative review sites and other web based results. Rankur is a valuable and productive tool for real time monitoring of web results, and also provides actual results of social media mentions, comments and threads. Rankur is used by companies such as Whole Foods Market, General Electric, Zara, Cabela’s, and Danone.
BUFFER
What is it?
Buffer is an internet-based reputation and brand management app used for handling social media content. Its primary function is sharing content across today’s popular social media sites an offers the ability to spread content with a simple approach. The app has the ability to connect to all social media accounts while making it easy create and schedule posts. Instead of traditionally logging in on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites, Buffer does it all at once. It makes it convenient for users to create posts and have them uploaded with a single click. The app includes a browser extension for seamless integration with Chrome, RSS readers, WordPress, and other important tools for sourcing content.
What does it do?
Buffer has an organized and sophisticated layout that makes it relatively easy to keep social media accounts updated and on track to develop a brand. It has an automated feature for timing social media posts. The social media management platform offers the ability to generate status updates and create tweets that can be posted across several networks at the same time, while giving a user the option to decide when the post is posted. A post can immediately be done or the user can opt for the “Add to Buffer” selection which lets the platform decide when it can make the post. Buffer provides a browser extension for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox that allows for content sharing on any page. An icon is on the current browser that lets a user share a certain link through Buffer within the present web page and also suggests texts that go with the link. The analytics feature will determine whether the decision of when to post a user’s content is most effective. The embedded analytics provides a smooth experience for smaller-sized business users and individuals. The information offered describes the number of clicks, mentions received, retweets, and reach of the user’s posts without overwhelming the user.
What does it cost?
Individual — Free
Includes: 3 total social accounts, 10 scheduled post per social accounts, Browser extension, Mobile apps with iOS and Android, Pablo Image creator, Video and GIF uploader
Awesome — $10/month
Includes: 10 total social accounts, 100 scheduled post per social accounts, All Individual features, RSS feed, Calendar, Link shortening and tracking, Social analytics
Small — $99/month
Includes: 25 total social accounts, Additional 5 team members, 2,000 scheduled post per social accounts, All Awesome features, Advanced social analytics
Medium — $199/month
Includes: 50 total social accounts, Additional 10 team members, 2,000 scheduled post per social accounts, All features
Large — $399/month
Includes: 150 total social accounts, Additional 25 team members, 2,000 scheduled post per social accounts, All features
What’s the verdict?
Buffer is very easy to use, it allows users to connect an RSS feed from their website so they can pull links and photos for Twitter and Facebook posts. Users will never forget to post a story and they do not have to spend huge amount of time to execute a social media strategy. Users have the ability to switch between multiple accounts and schedule posts, optimizing their time. Some users may be looking for more out of the analytics feature, especially click through and reach go. Companies including Microsoft, Shopify, and GitHub all use Buffer to manage social media and branding.
LITHIUM
What is it?
Lithium is an effective social media management tool that allows users to manage their social media presence, engage customers, and gather intelligent data. The platform enables complete community engagement that provides users with the ability to easily connect with their most passionate customers across all digital platforms. Lithium promotes customer to customer interaction through online communities to help improve brand awareness and increase sales. Lithium also offers a number of social listening tools, conversation management features, and media analytics to help users produce campaigns, collect insights and apply effective social media strategies.
What does it do?
Lithium is an integrated platform that links users with existing customers and brand influencers effectively. The system also enables customer to customer interaction through online communities, where they can share product information, experiences, concerns and recommendations. Lithium allows the user to meet the high expectations of their consumers with tools that supports relationships, engagement, and understanding. With Lithium’s online communities, customers can engage other customers and potential clients aiding in the brand’s innovation while reducing the costs of providing quality direct customer service. Lithium offers various social media management products designed to address various business requirements.
What does it cost?
Prices vary depending on the customized service a user requests.
What’s the verdict?
Lithium offers a robust interface that can manage large amounts of content in real-time. It is an effective tool for time management since it allows the user to filter social media posts on Facebook or Twitter which need to be responded to accordingly. It is designed in a visual way so one can easily track the flow and find out when the issue gets resolved. One concern is that Lithium cannot determine if the consumer is accessing a site from a mobile device such as a phone or a tablet. Lithium is implemented by companies such as Sony, Skype, and Barclaycard.
