A great monitoring tool, Google Alerts allow you to follow your e-reputation for free. In this post, we will explain you, step by step, how to set up a Google Alert to follow your digital reputation. We will also explain why this is by no means enough to effectively track your e-reputation. The only way to do this is to hire a professional, whose skills and tools allow for continuous monitoring of what is being said about you online.
Creating a Google Alert: instructions for use
Google Alerts is an indispensable monitoring tool: every time your name is mentioned, you receive an email. Want to create a Google Alert to monitor your e-reputation? We explain how:
- Start by accessing Google Alerts: https://www.google.fr/alerts and sign in with your Google account;
- In the search bar at the top of the page, type in your name (or any other topic you want to track). From then on, a preview of the alert will appear before you validate your choice;
- It is possible to change your settings before creating your Google Alert. To do so, view the options and change the following settings: frequency of notifications, sources or types of sites displayed, publishing language, region of publication of the web page, number of results displayed;
- After you have changed your settings, click “Create Alert”. You will start receiving emails whenever your name is mentioned.
Google alerts: an indispensable, but insufficient, monitoring tool
We told you, creating a Google alert is a great way to track your digital reputation. That said, it’s far from enough. To ensure an effective monitoring of your e-reputation, calling on a professional or a specialized agency whose job it is is essential. At this point, you are entitled to ask yourself why a Google alert would not be enough to monitor your digital reputation.
There are several reasons. One of them has to do with your profile. For example, if you are a celebrity or public figure, the results will be so numerous that it is virtually impossible to process all the alerts sent to you by Google. Dealing with all the alert emails is unrealistic, or at least chronophagous. That’s why more and more people who want to monitor their e-reputation are turning to companies whose business it is to do so, who have tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is what allows these professionals to do much more than just maintain a watch. Beyond monitoring your digital reputation, a professional is able to analyze the positive or negative sentiment of new results, which allows for alerts to be put inside the alert, such as tracking how often your name is mentioned, among other things (e.g., watch out, your name is mentioned 3 times more today than usual…).
