No matter who you are or what your business does, it’s just about impossible to avoid seeing negative feedback. And that’s OK because as many grumps there are wanting to push negative sentiment at your brand, there’s just as many speaking positively about you. However, without some form of social media reputation management, how do you even know what people are saying?
Word-of-mouth marketing should be taken very seriously. BrightLocal discovered 88% of consumers trust written online reviews from customers just as much as they trust their own peer recommendations. That should make the hair stand up on every brand marketer’s arm. It’s so easy to have one negative review, response or social media message leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth who sees it.
Social Media Reputation Management Needs Monitoring Tools
This is why so many businesses put their resources in social media monitoring tools to never miss a message–good or bad. Here at Sprout Social, we offer in-depth social media monitoring tools for brands to manage reputation, respond to questions or concerns and track social users who consistently mention your brand name.
What is Social Media Reputation Management?
Social media reputation management is the process of tracking, monitoring and ultimately eliminating negative social media material about your brand to improve your name or standing. If done properly, social media reputation management builds your credibility to customers, which strengthens their trust in your brand.
Know What You’re Monitoring
An important question to ask before starting is do you know what you need to monitor to improve your online reputation? If not, that’s fine because many brands don’t know what to look for besides the messages coming directly to them.
Connect Your Social Media Accounts to Sprout Social
If you read the section above and were wondering how in the heck are you going to track all those keywords on your social channels–don’t worry, we’ve got you. Sprout Social’s social media monitoring tools make it absolutely easy to not only track keywords across platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, but also have all the messages in a single-stream inbox.
Focus Your Efforts on Engagement
To truly engage with your customers, you have to listen to what they say. Social media engagement is a two way street, so make sure you’re listening to help build better customer trust and loyalty.
Social media continues to grow as the No. 1 resource for customer care. In fact, our Sprout Social Q2 2016 Index found the most popular avenue people take for customer care is social media (34.5%). What happened to 1-800 numbers? It turns out only 16.1% of people prefer 1-800 numbers as the main source for customer care help.
Encourage More Social Reviews
By encouraging more social media reviews, you have the chance to increase your reputation (especially if it’s limited or in a bad spot). Try to provide the easiest route possible to your most sought-after review sites. Clickable images, links in posts and specific images that have calls to action requesting reviews all work well.
Scale Reputation Management to Track ROI
For the marketing managers out there, here’s where we get to the good stuff. Maintaining a positive social media reputation can lead to a better return on investment. Investing in social media management tools can quickly pay off when you see positive reviews and conversations pouring in on social.