We live in a world where digital word of mouth has the highest power to make or break your sales. For that reason, brand reputation monitoring and understanding what people talk about your brand is essential to maintain a positive brand reputation. 77% of people read reviews ‘almost regularly’ before making a purchase, and 57% ‘will not use the business at all if it has not responded to reviews.

How was the service at the last restaurant you visited? Did you write a review? Also, did you check how well the luxury salon near you is rated? Would you prefer to go there if it were rated only two stars out of 5?

With these questions aside, let’s look into the reality of reviews and people making buying decisions based on that. 

The use of social media and review platforms has increased, and a good 67% of buyers consider leaving a positive review if they liked the service or the product they recently got. 

Let’s think of a review on the business site or review platform as a favor to the seller. But for us buyers, when we like the stuff we buy online or the new hairdo in a luxury salon, we instantly post it on our social media handles for our circle to see. While we influence people to use the service or the product we opted for, we also let them know when we regret making a purchase with a company. These actions create an image of the brands we speak about on social media platforms.

It is now clear that social media monitoring is for business owners and service providers to understand consumers’ perceptions of their business. Monitoring brand mentions, tracking reputation, and working on negative reviews lead to a better market share. 

What is brand reputation?

Brand reputation is what your buyers, consumers, and stakeholders think of your brand and how positive or negative their perception is towards your brand. Tools that support brand monitoring, sentiment analysis, and reputation management can help you gain a perspective on your reputation. 

With a negative brand reputation, you risk losing your market share, loyal customers who make repeated purchases, and most importantly, the trust that people have in your product or service.

What causes reputation risk?

Not just poor customer service, but many other actions could lead to a bad reputation and loss of trust in the brand. For instance, mismanagement in the workplace, employees misusing social media, any misfired third-party collaboration, etc. 

A bad reputation can entirely take down your business, leaving no trace of its existence. Delivering anything less than what your buyers, consumers, employees, and other stakeholders expect is a recipe for reputation risk. This must be addressed immediately before your brand’s negative perception spreads like wildfire. 

Look at what happened to this social media giant once people lost their trust in the brand.

After a wrong turn of events, Facebook had to suspend its collaborations with a data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica. The social media giant lost its market capitalization of  $43 billion after being exposed for breaching the personal data of more than 50 million users. To date, this stands as a lesson for many brands as to what would happen when people lose trust in the brand.

Coming back to reputation management for brands, you should watch out for any queries, support, comments, or suggestions that customers post on social media. This helps you stay aware of your brand reputation and gives you a chance to interact and build credibility. 

A brand here takes the opportunity to help its customer and creates a good reputation. 

Nike faced a customer that had issues with his account. The brand was ready to help right then and there and ensured that the customer could count on it for future support. 

A small reply to your customer goes a long way in earning their trust and influencing the spectators to become potential leads. 

If you own a product or a service, then here are some important factors that you can’t miss looking into. These are the key elements for successful brand reputation management. 

Sentiment analysis comes first 

Sentiment analysis tools decipher the emotions based on texts and images. This is beneficial for brands to discover a social group’s sentiment towards its products or service. As you read earlier, most conversations amongst buyers about a brand happen on social media. Social media sentiment analysis combines two things – what aspects of the products or services do the consumers like and what they talk about them. 

With clear-cut ideas of what your buyers prefer and what they want you to improve, you can narrow down your focus on a particular targeted aspect, saving costs and effort. 

Brand monitoring is also important

Brand monitoring is watching different social media channels, forums, review websites, and almost every digital space for brand mentions. Not just big brands but any company in the digital space should monitor what’s said about their brand to maintain their reputation. Brand monitoring is a must if you want to increase audience engagement, build trust, understand their expectations, and cater to the right crowd. 

Seize the chance to respond when someone reviews your car wash service or comments about your restaurant’s food. Share it across your social channels and attract new buyers if it is positive. If it is negative, take responsibility, respond to them nicely and offer the best you can. If any crisis is handled this way, the chances of you losing your customers to your competitors would drastically come down.

Here’s an example of how this restaurant handled a negative review from its customer like a boss. 

It is up to your customers to post a positive or negative review about your service, but how you handle it increases revisits and attracts new customers. This owner’s response creates an impression that this restaurant is good at its services despite a negative review and can handle crises. 

Simplify your brand’s online reputation management

Now comes the question of how many reviews and comments can be answered at a time, and how many review sites can be monitored manually. 

An online reputation management tool should be of great support with which you can monitor your brand mentions, social reviews performance, analyze sentiment towards your products or services and create an impact on your buyers.

Respond to direct messages from the software, track brand mentions across the digital space, watch for negative comments that could hinder your progress, and address it using the reputation management tool.

BuzzSense is an online reputation management tool that helps you segregate audience sentiment towards your service, aggregate and share customer-generated content across different channels, and do more to create an excellent brand reputation. If you are looking to acquire a higher range of market share, then start your journey with our demo.  

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