With millions of people signing up daily across social media platforms, keeping track of conversations about your brand online is becoming an uphill battle. What customers say and how they relate with your business can greatly affect your online reputation.
It can take as little as one bad review to send all your hard work crashing like a pack of cards. Several brands, including United Airlines, have reportedly lost patrons and billions in value due to their poor management of the Flight 3411 incident involving a forcefully removed passenger that went viral online.
Why leave your precious brand reputation up to others when you can effectively maintain a positive brand image through online reputation management? Reputation management helps you maintain a professional image and improve your customers’ perception of your brand. It can boost your brand visibility, increase revenue, and build customer trust.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into everything you need to know about reputation management, including important features and how you can choose the best software to help your target audience connect with your brand better.
Table of Contents
- What is reputation management software?
- Top 10 online reputation management software
- How to select the best reputation management software for your business
- Successful reputation management: From reactive to proactive
What is a reputation management software?
Reputation management software is a tool that allows businesses to promote their brand positively and respond promptly to negative customer experiences before they spiral out of control. Reputation management encompasses online review management and social listening, where businesses can monitor and respond to reviews that influence how people perceive their brand.
However, it’s much more than that, as review management is only one core part. A standard reputation management software also includes news monitoring, competitive analysis, and customer service, which all work together to help brands cultivate a strong reputation.
Top 10 online reputation management software
These are the top 10 online reputation management software for businesses:
1. Sprout Social
At the forefront of the list of top online reputation management software is Sprout Social, which functions as a one-stop shop for everything regarding brand reputation management. Brands can take advantage of Sprout’s review management, social listening and sentiment analysis features to monitor their brand’s online reputation at all times.
What are your customer’s opinions about your product? Are there positive reviews gaining traction online that need to be documented? Do you need to mitigate a social media crisis? These are daily pain points that brands face, and Sprout Social provides easy-to-use features to help brands respond to feedback and tackle issues effectively.
Sprout also can help your team increase ROI and efficiency through automation, chatbots and artificial intelligence.
2. Podium
Another tool that simplifies online reputation management for local businesses is Podium. Podium focuses on driving more leads and building engagement by taking advantage of the seamlessness of texting.
With this tool, customers can leave reviews for your products in a few clicks. As a brand, you can automate review invites, track online trends and keywords, respond promptly to reviews and build better customer relationships through its interface.
This online reputation management software works great with Google Reviews and is a handy tool for enhancing customer service. However, it doesn’t help with social media management or social listening.
3. Birdeye
This AI-powered platform helps brands manage their online reputation effortlessly and build great customer relationships. Birdeye is a tool that helps you leverage the power of AI so you can boost ratings, be more aware of customer feedback, and understand what your customers want. Through this online reputation management software, businesses can gain customer experience insights to help them effectively target pain points and grow sales.
Birdeye also helps to connect better with prospects through available social media channels. Establishing trust with your customer base significantly affects ROI and business growth.
4. Yext
Businesses with physical stores that need to regularly update their customers on location changes or expansion to multiple areas can take advantage of Yext to do this seamlessly. This is one of the best tools to manage your online footprint and help customers find you easily.
Yext allows users to update search engines with relevant keywords and include their information in major online directories. It also offers personalized responses for better communication and a centralized review dashboard so brands can always be updated on positive or negative feedback online. However, there are no integrated features for social media management.
5. Trustpilot
Due to its broad reach as a public platform, brands can leverage Trustpilot to follow up on trends and conversations about their business and competitive advantages.
Brands can encourage their customers to leave reviews here to build a positive reputation online. You can also use this to monitor what customers say about your competitors and how you can improve your products to stay ahead of them in your industry.
6. Brand24
When choosing an online reputation management software, a critical feature to watch out for is keeping track of what customers and critics are saying about your brand online. Brand24 features a media monitoring and analytics tool that does this satisfactorily. These tools provide brands with proper insight into their online presence.
Apart from this, you can stay updated on any keyword associated with your brand on social media, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. It also monitors reviews on top review sites like Google App Store, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Brand24 features a tool that analyzes the performance of your keywords based on social media reach and sentiment analysis.
7. Mention
Mention features The Brand Grader, a dedicated tool for monitoring and analyzing online reputation management. The tracking runs across various websites, review platforms and social media. Due to this wide reach, several brands can count on this online reputation management software to provide valuable insights and timely updates whenever there’s a mention of a keyword associated with the brand. However, gaining access to the feature on sentiment analysis requires a pro plan that costs more.
8. Broadly
Broadly is a web-based, cloud online reputation management software targeted at making small and medium businesses stand out within and outside their locality. For most small businesses, attracting leads through positive reviews and connecting with customers can be a hassle, especially when considering your competition’s quality and spread.
However, Broadly helps to make this easier by implementing features to help you do this from a single easy-to-use app. Some of these features include streamlined email communication, automated web chat, automatically sending out review requests, Google leads, reminders for clients about appointments and managing all interactive social media platforms within one tool.
9. Qualtrics
The primary feature of Qualtrics is to help brands collect and organize customer feedback through ready-to-use survey templates. These surveys can be distributed via diverse methods, including chatbots, web-based question-and-answer systems, in-app features and mobile devices.
Through this feedback, brands can learn first-hand what their customers think about their products and ways to improve their service delivery significantly. This is a handy way to listen in on conversations surrounding your brand’s image and act accordingly. Qualtrics is best for conducting market research around marketing and branding for your business, as it lacks social media management and competitive analysis features.
10. Google Alerts
You may not have considered it, but Google Alerts is a free and simple software you can use to monitor your online mentions and, by extension, your reputation. Use Google Alerts to monitor the web, including social media, for your business name, trademarks, competitors and even your own name.
Setting up alerts and tracking specific keywords allows you to manage mentions around your brand’s reputation – both positive and negative. Once you set up alerts around specific keywords, you’ll receive an email notification as soon as those keywords are discovered online.
How to select the best reputation management software for your business
Before selecting a reputation management software for your business, you should answer one crucial question: why do you need this software? Knowing your “why” helps you understand the important features to look out for during your search. However, selecting the best online reputation management software depends on the organization’s size or industry.
Smaller, local businesses need to focus more on competitor analytics to help them identify growth opportunities and evaluate how they rank within your industry. Bigger companies must keep track of the myriad conversations that will influence their trust and credibility. Overall, the most important features are the availability of a collaborative workspace, multichannel capabilities, AI and automation, reporting and scalability with ease of deployment.
Most important features of a reputation management tool:
There are many reputation management tools in the market today, and finding one that suits your needs can be overwhelming. Each tool has unique features, so it’s important to research the available options before deciding.
As you research reputation management tools, look out for these features:
Collaborative workspace
One of the best ways to build an efficient team is to help them work together as seamlessly as possible. When there’s a linkage across various departments, it becomes easier to manage information and carry out tasks without unnecessary overlaps. This also applies to online reputation management.
As a brand, you need an efficient tool that allows internal and external teams to collaborate during social media campaigns. It’s important to use a tool that provides access to multiple users to manage various stages of online reputation management without interference.
Sprout provides a centralized dashboard that serves as a one-stop command center where team members can collaborate on social media management tasks. Multiple team members can brainstorm ideas, collaborate on social media post creation, schedule it and monitor analytics in real-time.
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Multichannel
Many channels are available today to drive conversations and shape opinions about your brand. From Google Reviews and Yelp to Twitter and Facebook, keeping track of them manually is time-consuming and exhausting.
However, an online reputation management tool that seamlessly integrates with as many channels as possible to provide timely insights and help you improve your overall brand strategy is always a win. This tool should help you aggregate all the data collected into one easy-to-use platform where you can analyze and streamline your responses for better results.
The Sprout Smart Inbox allows social media and customer care teams to view and manage incoming messages on multiple social platforms and respond quickly.
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AI and automation
The purpose of online reputation management software is to help you keep track of the numerous conversations about your brand. This can be difficult to do manually, and that’s where AI and automation come in.
With auto notifications, you can get an instant update on a positive comment or negative feedback about your brand and act accordingly. One of the best ways to manage your brand’s reputation is to respond to negative feedback early.
AI can also help you carry out detailed sentiment analysis and automated monitoring, where you get deeper insights into the general reaction around your brand and respond to positive reviews automatically with a link that builds customer relationships.
Reporting
The best reputation management tools provide timely updates about your customers and how they view your products. However, this shouldn’t be limited to just reporting.
Your chosen tool should also be able to measure and analyze these reports across various channels. This means tracking emerging conversations and their origins across social media platforms and generating reports to help you build a better online presence.
Scalability with ease of deployment
Having exceptional features is excellent, but it becomes a burden on your brand when it’s too rigid and doesn’t integrate easily with newer solutions. Therefore, an important feature when choosing a reputation management tool is to look out for one that can easily handle increasing workloads as you work towards monitoring your brand’s reputation across various channels.
Your chosen tool should respond well to changes and updates and not resist expansion as your technology and employees grow. Total flexibility is necessary as there will be more social media platforms over time, and your reputation management tool should have media monitoring capabilities.
Successful reputation management: From reactive to proactive
Online reputation management is no walk in the park. You need to connect with your audience and build trust consistently; these are long-term strategies. But one thing that makes this journey easier is choosing the right online reputation management software.
Ready to position your brand better online and take control of your image? Sign up for a free trial of Sprout Social and test our reputation management features, including sentiment analysis, automation, and social listening.