Maintaining your reputation on social media isn’t a choice, but a necessity.
Today, social media platforms now play an undeniable role in helping users form a public perception of brands and individuals alike.
And with over 5.24 billion social media users worldwide, monitoring online activities becomes necessary to design a powerful presence that reflects brand values.
This brings us to consider some critical points that can help you elevate your brand’s social media reputation by executing result-driven strategies, ensuring best practices, and leveraging tools.
In this blog, I’ve covered everything that you need to know. Before we get into why it’s an important item to assess today, let’s quickly understand what it means.
What is Social Media Reputation Management?
Social media reputation management refers to the process of monitoring the activities taking place on your social media handles.
It’s a dynamic strategy that includes keeping an eye on brand mentions, tracking reviews, analyzing engagement, and staying in touch with customers.
But while it might seem manageable, it requires timely observation and sharp analytical skills.
On one hand, it’s about responding to positive opinions, but it’s also about reducing the chances of any potentially reputation-damaging comments and taking proactive action.
For social media marketers, online reputation management isn’t a one-off task but rather a vigilant activity to uphold their brand’s identity in their target market and in general as a whole.
Why is Social Media Reputation Management Essential Today?
Maintaining a positive brand image in today’s market where consumers have hundreds of alternative options available requires your social media reputation to be near to perfect.
And there are multiple reasons to justify why its increasing importance is taking over marketers’ strategies such as effect on consumer’s purchase behavior, brand trust, tackling crisis, loyalty, etc.
Let’s discuss them one by one as they underscore the importance of a brand’s online reputation:
1. Fuels Online & Offline Purchase Decisions
Looking at BrightLocal’s study where they found around 76% of consumers checking online business reviews during their purchase, speaks volumes about how important the “reputation” factor can be.
So, larger the number of positive reviews, more likely are the chances of your products or services being sold with minimum friction.
From the social media image perspective, good reviews are your growth drivers on auto-pilot. They will help you pull potential customers toward your brand and boost widespread awareness.
2. Impacts Customer Trust and Loyalty
While managing your brand reputation, it’s advisable to go heavy on user engagement. Because this boosts the brand commitment value in the customers’ minds, fostering trust and loyalty.
Many brands today in the likes of Netflix, Flipkart, Zomato, etc., are actively involved in user replies, stories, and overall responsiveness.
This has been helping them reinforce customer trust and establish a customer-centric brand in their existing and target market.
3. Drives Effective Crisis Management
During a crisis, swift and empathetic responses have saved many brands from social reputation damage.
On one hand, not only this behavior helps mitigate unwanted problems but also builds an image of a responsive brand in the market.
Therefore, social media reputation monitoring here plays a critical role in helping businesses address issues way before they escalate.
5 Social Media Reputation Management Strategies
If you’re planning to cultivate a foolproof strategy for social media reputation, you need to effectively execute a bunch of activities.
Here are the necessary steps:
1. Consistent Engagement
Surprisingly enough, this is an underrated strategy that many global brands fail to execute even today.
By regularly interacting with your customers on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, or LinkedIn, you can build an identity of a brand that cares about them.
Now, engagement could be through anything – comments, messages, or videos. This will help you foster a sense of community and display that you value your customers’ input.
Here’s how Spotify does it well through their handle @SpotifyCares:
2. Monitor Mentions and Brand Sentiment
Social media reputation monitoring requires a comprehensive approach to keeping an eye on your brand-related activities across the web.
And it might seem daunting, especially if you’re a global brand with millions of social followers.
But even if you’re a small business, monitoring brand mentions will help you connect better with your customers and build a long-term brand.
Leverage social listening tools [mentioned below in detail] to keep track of what is being mentioned about your brand online.
Using these tools, you can watch out for any upcoming trends, activities, comments, or concerns, and address them quickly to maintain customer loyalty and trust.
3. Prompt Response to Negative Feedback
If you are a social media marketer and believe that responding to criticism requires enormous strength, that’s true!
But there’s an added advantage to it. The quick your response is – the more strengthened your brand’s identity will be.
Here’s an example of how Amazon Help responded to one of the queries:
Addressing criticisms promptly, professionally, and with empathy will position your brand as customer-centric and not revenue-centric.
Your customers are the blood of your business. Offering them quick solutions or apologies will turn their dissatisfaction into loyalty.
4. Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
On social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, UGC content has seen exponential growth with 54% and 42% of creators respectively, posting content about brands they like.
Many brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, etc., have launched social campaigns encouraging customers to share their experiences on social media.
Here’s how Coca-Cola struck gold with their unique idea:
Through their campaign, Coca-Cola sold a whopping $150 million personalized bottles with over close to 5,00,000 social shares across the web.
This UGC campaign not only solidified Coca-Cola’s global brand image as a soft drink giant but also boosted its revenue by millions.
5. Collaborate with Influencers
Influencer collaboration is the hottest thing right now as far as social media brand reputation is concerned.
Joining hands with niche influencers is an excellent way to establish a unique identity and stand out from competitors.
Given how quickly social media users form a perception or affiliation about a particular influencer’s identity with a brand, executing a perfect campaign can boost awareness and long-term credibility.
4 Best Online Reputation Management Tools
Taking use of social reputation management tools can prove beneficial for your brand.
This is because they broadly allow you to keep a tab on current happenings and offer you granular insights into activities on your social accounts.
Check out the most used tools below:
1. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is known as a social listening tool proficient in providing in-depth analysis for small and medium business enterprises.
Recently, it has launched AI-driven insights and competitor benchmarking reports.
Key features include advanced sentiment analysis and custom dashboards & reporting.
2. Reputation
Reputation is mostly focused on managing and improving online brand reputation.
It allows you to consolidate user reviews, run and manage surveys, and track social media mentions under one roof.
Key features include centralized review aggregation and response management setup for quicker responses to users.
Also, you can view customer experience analytics and sentiment analysis to better sense your brand’s social presence.
3. Mention
Another online reputation management tool, Mention is one of the most widely used tools specifically allowing brands to cross-track simultaneous mentions across social media, news, and blogs.
According to users, they like it’s user-friendly dashboard and overall functionality.
Mention is well-suitable for businesses of all sizes and helps you generate automated reports for overall brand performance analysis.
4. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free online reputation monitoring tool that notifies you about new web content featuring specific keywords. It’s lightweight but lacks social media coverage.
Key Features:
- Custom keyword alerts
- Email notifications
- Free and easy to use
- Web-based tracking
Top Online Reputation Management Examples
The decades-old phrase ‘The customer is always correct’ holds immense value when it comes to managing reputation on social media today.
Looking back at how 44% of global users as per 2023’s survey reportedly reached out to brands using social platforms to register complaints, it becomes imperative for global brands to house a dedicated social media reputation team to handle such activities.
While some brands continue to provide unmetered after-service support to customers, unfortunately, a bunch of brands tend to just simply acknowledge issues and take negligible actions or to say the least, ignore such online posts.
Check out a few brand reputation case study examples below where brands took prompt notice of complaints and managed to uphold their brand’s social media reputation:
1. American Airlines
When an American Airlines flight collided with an army helicopter at the Reagan Airport, the airline’s quick response was positively noted.
In just an hour or two, the airline’s CEO Robert posted a video statement, displaying a great show of sympathy for the casualties and emphasizing how they were cooperating with the investigative formalities.
24 hours later, he also appeared for a media briefing and addressed queries and questions, extending complete support to the tragedy that occurred.
From the social media reputation or market sentiment POV, there’s no concrete evidence of whether this massive incident impacted their share price or not.
However, such incidents do test your online reputation management preparedness and the ability to deal effectively.
American Airlines displayed decent clarity alongside a quick response, highlighting their commitment and seriousness to the tragedy.
2. KFC
KFC’s story is no less than a masterclass in handling an internal product issue and generating a stronger-than-ever social media reputation.
Surely, it did impact its online reputation with customers calling out the brand on social platforms for its mismanagement.
However, its honest and humorous response to the 2018 chicken shortage crisis is what attracted widespread global citations and reactions from leading print & digital news agencies.
Here’s a sneak peek into KFC’s BrandIndex Data following the crisis:
But the most important part here is to analyze its confidently-humorous response. After they issued a public apology and acknowledged the crisis, hashtags like #KFCCrisis and #ChickenCrisisKFC began to surface on social media platforms.
The chicken shortage caused around 900 outlets in the UK to shut down with customers shouting that they were being forced to turn to Burger King to enjoy hot wings!
So to empathize with customers across their hundreds of outlets, they published a press release in the United Kingdom’s 2 leading newspapers with a humorous take on the chicken shortage.
Here’s what it looked like:
That’s not it. This catchy copy caught the attention of millions with people quoting KFC’s strategy as a transformative technique to the traditional crisis management playbook.
Here’s a look at a few statistics that prove their strategy further turned out to strengthen their social media reputation:
3. Air France
Smoothly flying your passengers from Location A to Location B isn’t as easy as it looks.
With tons of operational, administrative, and logistical activities involved, there have been multiple instances of things going wrong unintentionally, of course.
Air France faced a similar issue – On a complaint tweeted by a passenger claiming file access and status update on his lost luggage, the airlines quickly responded by seeking grievance details for redressal.
Whether they perfectly managed to find and return his luggage or not is another scenario, what’s important is that they quickly resorted to resolving it at the earliest.
Looking at a massive 200 Million users daily accessing X, responding to your customer’s queries or complaints promptly goes a long way in establishing a strong brand reputation.
Conclusion
Negative reviews, viral complaints, or poor customer experiences can spread rapidly, making real-time response crucial.
A strong reputation management strategy includes prompt responses to complaints, encouraging positive user-generated content, and maintaining transparency in communication.
Businesses can safeguard their brand image and foster long-term customer loyalty by consistently monitoring feedback, engaging authentically, and addressing issues head-on.
