When most people think about online marketing, they think about content and words and creativity—using the right side of the brain. While this is a huge part of online marketing, there are also quite a few numbers involved. Between quality scores, SEO rankings, conversions, time on site numbers, numbers on Google versus Bing versus Yahoo, the left side of your brain really gets a workout.
Sometimes the last thing that businesses want is yet another number to deal with. However, many are making an exception for Bing’s latest endeavor, an online reputation management tool called Brandify, which reveals a unique reputation score for your business.
How Brandify Works
Brandify is a free tool that helps bloggers and other website owners monitor and improve their online reputation. The biggest advantage to Brandify is the Brandify score. The tool takes hundreds of aspects of your website and analyzes them to create a score. The score can range from 450-850 with an average score of 572. Below are a few ways this score is calculated and a few of the extra features the tool offers:
- Analyze Data – In order to determine your online reputation, Brandify analyzes both your SEO as well as your social media. It looks at networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Bing, and Yelp, and it looks at aspects of your website such as your online engagement with your fans/followers and how well you perform on SERPs.
- Competitors – Not only can you analyze your own online brand, but you can also analyze those of your competitors! This will help give you a benchmark of where your score should be in order to really succeed.
- Visuals – All results are shown to you graphically so that you can see your score history and strength of your score. You will also be able to see how your competitors are doing in comparison to you through an intuitive bar graph.
- Recommendations – Whether your score is good or bad, Brandify will give you recommendations about how to improve. The recommendations are based on other companies and what is working for the other companies.
- Updates – The tool will help give you updates if you ever get a new social media follower or improve your online presence in someway. This helps make it easy for busy brands to stay organized.
- Engagement – There is a forum where you can connect with others using the tool and discuss what is and is not working for them. This is a great way to improve your strategy and continue to succeed when it comes to networking.
Brandify currently only allows you to analyze one website; however it would certainly be no surprise if this changes in the near future. The tool is in the Beta stage, so it still comes free of cost.
How to Get Started
Because Brandify is free, all you need to do is logon through Facebook, LinkedIn, or Windows Live ID and then claim your business. To register your business, you simply have to offer information such as the name of your business, your URL, the Zip code, and whether or not you’re a local, online, or franchise-type business. You then connect your brand with all of your social profiles, and you're set to go.
Online Reputation Management Options
In addition to Brandify, remember that there are various other options for managing your online reputation, including Google Alerts, SproutSocial, HootSuite, Trackur, Sysomos, Raven Tools, Brandwatch, etc. What is especially helpful with Brandify is the Brandify score, but it’s advisable for you to test out various tools and see what’s best for your business and monitoring preferences.
