As a realtor, your name is your reputation. Many realtors start out with one company and may move on to another as their business evolves. And maintaining your relationships with buyers, sellers and potential customers is critical to your success. So is managing your online reputation. In previous articles, we talked about creating your online presence and assessing it. Now we will talk about managing it.

Your Name

You may currently work for Weichert, ReMaxx, Keller Williams, or some other firm. And at some point, you may choose to move to a different firm. But your customers know you as your name. When you entered into real estate, did you purchase your name domain? If not, you should. And your online presence should start there. No matter where you work, your domain will always be your name (which might be your personal name or a business name easily associated with you), and you can more easily manage your online reputation. While you can link to social media platforms from your website, you can also create a business presence using your name on social media.

Monitoring The Conversation

Now that you are actively engaging with your community and sharing content on social media, you are probably finding that monitoring the conversations is a bit time consuming. You can use social media monitoring tools to “listen” to what is being said about you and quickly respond. This enables you to quickly respond to negative and positive comments, or take a negative issue offline to address it before it goes viral.

There are several social media monitoring tools that range from free to premium tools. However, it is important to remember these tools can help you monitor what is being said on specific platforms, they cannot capture everything on the internet, so you should still perform regular searches to keep abreast of what may be said on other websites.

Online Reputation Monitoring/Management Tools

One tool that can help you automate posting of updates to social media sites as well as monitor mentions of your name is hootsuite.  Through this platform you can easily monitor and manage your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ pages from one dashboard. You can schedule your updates to different platforms and analyze your engagement with their analytics. You can also monitor other streams of information, i.e. competition, lists of influencers you have created on Twitter, etc.

Some other free tools you can use:

• Me On The Web is a free tool that Google offers within the Google Dashboard, that can help you understand and manage what people see when they search for you on Google.  You can choose to be notified when your personal data appears on the web and also get tips on removing content from Google’s search results.
• Google Alerts is a free tool that monitors all sites that Google can index and offers you the option to be notified as it happens or weekly.
• SocialMention is a free tool that helps you monitor what is being said over 70 social media platforms.
• Reputation offers personal and business monitoring through a dashboard that quickly offers you insight into your online reputation. While their personal monitoring is free, their other services are not.