Do you want to make sure your brand has the best reputation possible? You need to use the right set of brand monitoring tools. These tools can help you keep track of reviews and other comments online. In fact writing your own brand monitoring extraction tool in Ruby is very doable.
That way, you can learn from the positive and address the negative. In the future, you can know what to keep doing and what to avoid to maintain a good reputation.
Keep reading to learn how brand monitoring works with Ruby.
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What Is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring involves reviewing your brand and its online presence. You can use online brand monitoring to learn how customers and the public feel about your brand.
Using something like the Ruby programming language is a great way to keep track of your brand. Then, you can ensure that customers have a positive view of your business. If not, you can learn about the issues and fix them.
Benefits of Online Brand Monitoring
Online brand monitoring can seem daunting at first, so you might put off starting it. However, the various benefits of brand monitoring show that you shouldn’t wait to monitor your brand.
Whether your brand is new or you want to revamp your current brand, you can use brand monitoring tools. Then, you can make sure that you build a good reputation from the start.
Consider a few of the benefits of brand monitoring.
Track What Others Say
Brand monitoring makes it easy to track what other people say about your brand. While you can see what people say using social media or review sites, like Yelp, those can only tell you so much.
Ruby programming lets you obtain data from anywhere online. Then, you can track reviews on websites and blogs that you may not find easily. And you can better examine reviews on review websites without having to scan or read dozens of comments.
Learn About Your Brand
Of course, you should be an expert on your brand. But you may not be an expert on your brand from a customer perspective. Brand monitoring allows you to learn about others’ opinions and your public reputation.
Knowing how others feel about your brand and business has many benefits in and of itself. You can make sure any new products or services you offer meet your audience’s needs. If you don’t have a good reputation now, you’ll know how you can improve it.
Fix Problems
The internet is a massive place, so it can be easy to miss small things, like negative rumors. By extracting web data online using PHP, Ruby or a similar language, you can catch those issues.
That way, you can fix anything and address the criticism before it blows up. It will be easier to avert a small problem and get back to normal, and programming languages can help you do that.
What Is Ruby?
Ruby is a programming language that you can use for a lot of things. It’s an open-source, dynamic language, meaning that anyone can contribute to it and make it better.
The language’s syntax is easy to read, so you don’t need to be a professional programmer to use it. And because reading the syntax is easy, so is writing it.
Once you learn the basics of Ruby, you’ll be able to use it with web scraping. That way, you can monitor your brand without having to manually check every review.
How the Ruby Programming Language Helps
The Ruby programming language can help with the main brand monitoring benefits. Ruby is an excellent web scraping language, so you can quickly track what other people say.
With general brand monitoring, you would need to manually visit different websites and read through them. You may decide to copy and paste some reviews. However, that can take a lot of time and effort.
Fortunately, Ruby lets you speed up that process. Web scraping uses a bit of code to extract data from a website at once. Then, you can save the data in a spreadsheet or another file to view now or reference later. We also recommend using a build-and-deploy cloud software platform to get your scraping tool up and running as quickly as possible.
Ruby works with a couple of different brand monitoring tools, so you can use it no matter what type of web page you want to scrape. You won’t have to spend as much time monitoring your brand online.
Brand Monitoring Tools
Along with Ruby, you can use brand monitoring tools to help the web scraping process. These tools work well with different types of websites so that you can track various data points.
You’ll be able to track online reviews, social media posts, and other content. You can search for your brand using Google or start with a review site, like Yelp.
Two of the most popular tools for brand monitoring with Ruby are Kimurai and Nokogiri. Consider how those tools work.
Kimurai
Kimurai is the perfect tool for web scraping dynamic web pages. Dynamic pages change with each visit, so the content can be harder to find compared to a static web page. To scrape these pages, you’ll need to install Kimurai, PhantomJS, geckodriver, and chromedriver.
If you don’t already, you will need to use Chrome or Firefox as your browser. Kimurai works well on pages that use JavaScript to render.
Once you install everything and choose a website, you can look for the source code. Then, you can collect the data you want and import it to a program of your choice. You’ll be able to use the data to improve your brand presence.
Nokogiri
The Nokogiri gem is another tool within Ruby that you can use for parsing HTML. This tool is great for extracting web page titles and links. You’ll be able to obtain the HTML, which serves as the backbone for the website.
If you find a review that links to different websites, Nokogiri is a great choice. Not only can you extract the current web page, but you can find the pages it links to. Then, you can check out those websites and look for more reviews or commentary on your brand.
Once you download the HTML, you can filter through it to find what you need. That can save you a lot of time and effort as you look at reviews and opinions of your brand and business.
Is Ruby the Best Brand Monitoring Option?
You can’t go wrong with using the Ruby programming language for brand monitoring. It’s flexible and easy to use for people with and without much coding experience. Brand monitoring tools like Kimurai and Nokogiri make it easy to look at static and dynamic web pages.
And you can easily find links to other reviews on your brand. Then, you can keep from having to spend hours searching for reviews and thoughts online. Once you find those opinions, you can work to improve them.
While you can’t use Ruby or any other web scraping tool to improve your reputation, web scraping is a crucial step. A new brand may not need to scrape multiple pages, but using web scraping now will prepare you for later.
As your brand becomes more popular, you can simplify your reputation management. You won’t have to learn new tools or techniques.
Is Brand Monitoring With Ruby Right for You?
Brand monitoring can be time-consuming, but the right brand monitoring tools can make the process quick and straightforward. That way, you don’t have to spend hours crawling the web to find positive and negative reviews.
Instead, you can find reviews sooner so that you can address any problems. Then, you can start building a better reputation for your business.
