Online conversations can have a lasting effect on your brand. One response sent in the heat of the moment or a negative comment ignored for too long can have a ripple effect that can damage your brand’s online reputation.
This is not only a momentary harmful act; it can also affect your brand’s sales and overall processes.
To avoid such negative situations, any business needs to have a reputation management policy. It can’t just be a few lines that outline your brand’s main principles; you have to define who does what, how you respond, and how you should respond in tricky situations.
In the digital age, online reputation can make or break a company. In this blog, we’ll tell you how to create a reputation management policy that works for you!
What is reputation management policy?
Fundamentally, a reputation management strategy is a compass for your brand. It’s a manual that details the policies and procedures your team must adhere to to safeguard the reputation of your business successfully.
It’s like a strategic roadmap that outlines how your team should handle the challenges of preserving a good online reputation. It serves as your proactive defense against potential reputational issues and is more than just a document.
A reputation management policy defines who is responsible for keeping an eye on online interactions, responding to feedback, and even dealing with unexpected reputation crises.
It is essential to design tasks and ensure that everyone understands their part in this process to improve reputations. It’s all about being consistent and professional, setting a tone that resonates with your brand’s values.
Why is the policy important?
Reputation management policy is a reactive tool and your proactive shield in the digital environment. Let’s examine why having such a policy is not only essential but also unavoidably required:
1. Managing your reputation actively
Your reputation will always be under scrutiny in this digital era. Having a reputation management policy means you’re not just reacting to situations but actively protecting your image. By establishing clear guidelines for online interactions and crisis management, you’ll be ready to respond promptly to potential issues. This proactive strategy acts as a barrier, shielding your company’s reputation from harm.
2. Consistency with your actions
Consistency is the basis upon which trust is created. Thanks to your reputation management approach, your company continually manages internet difficulties. This reliability builds trust with customers and stakeholders by displaying your unwavering commitment to upholding the name and principles of your company in all dealings. It’s equivalent to saying, “You can rely on us.”
3. Enhanced customer trust
The most valuable currency in the digital era is trust. Policies for reputation management usually contain guidance on handling consumer feedback and criticism. You show that your consumers’ ideas are essential by responding to customer concerns right away, skillfully, and sympathetically. Customer interactions and loyalty are improved as a result. Your insurance policy means you can say, “We’re here to listen and make things right.”
4. Gain a Competitive Advantage
Businesses with effective reputation management procedures gain a competitive edge. They can show their commitment to keeping a positive online reputation. This dedication both retains existing customers and attracts new ones. When collaborations succeed, growth becomes a goal that is within reach.
What should your online reputation management policy include?
To build an effective reputation management policy, it is vital to include several crucial components:
1. Designate responsibility
It’s critical to identify in your policy who will monitor your brand’s online presence. The marketing or customer service teams are often in charge of this because they frequently communicate with your online audience. You can ensure that monitoring is accurate and efficient by designating certain duties.
2. Comment response guidelines
Your policy should provide detailed guidelines on how to reply to reviews and comments in a way that upholds the key principles of your business. Regardless of the feedback, always emphasize professionalism and respect in your response. Encourage your team to respond to criticism in a kind and positive way.
3. Defining authority structure for the response
List the people who can respond to different kinds of comments. Your social media or customer service staff can suitably reply to common or favorable remarks. However, your policy should grant authority to make decisions in more complex or delicate situations. This may involve managers, communication experts, or even the company owner to ensure timely and efficient responses.
4. Define how to handle negative comments
Develop a comprehensive plan for responding to negative comments as part of your reputation management policy. Your team should be instructed on how to distinguish trolls from constructive criticism.
The policy should outline when and how to respond to negative comments, reviews, or mentions. Understand when to sincerely accept responsibility for errors, make corrective actions, and distinguish between private and public responses. A good policy will define how your business responds to criticism effectively while maintaining its reputation.
5. Crisis management protocol
Your reputation management policy needs to include specific crisis management steps. Make a step-by-step plan, including who is involved, how to contact them, and how to escalate the situation to handle significant reputational issues.
Prepare crisis scenarios and create solutions to lessen harm in challenging situations. This proactive approach ensures that your business can respond to crises swiftly and effectively, minimizing damage to your brand’s reputation.
6. Good training practices
Prioritize staff training in your policy. Share the best practices for reputation management with your staff. Ensure they are fully aware of what must be done to maintain the brand’s good reputation. Training should cover appropriate responses, recognize potential reputational problems, and adhere to the brand’s reputation guidelines.
By investing in employee training, you provide your team with the knowledge and skills they require to address criticism courteously and in line with the objectives of your business.
7. Chain of command
For your policy, establish a distinct chain of command. Name the person authorized to represent the company in public during reputation-related problems. This ensures that decisions are made swiftly and consistently, particularly in urgent circumstances.
Find the key decision-makers, such as the business owner or the owner of the direct report. This clarity enables your company to react to reputational problems well and effectively.
8. Consistent policy reviews
Make sure to review and revise your reputation management strategy frequently. The internet is ever changing, thus, new problems could arise anytime. By frequently reviewing your policy, you can adjust to reflect new situations, technology, and audience expectations. This continuing commitment ensures that your policy successfully protects the brand and goodwill of your company.
9. Choosing the appropriate tools
You must provide the monitoring, analysis, and reporting methods used for policies. These tools should be carefully chosen to match your business’s particular requirements and budgetary constraints. These tools should give you insightful information and enable your team to make wise judgments. Your reputation management tactics can be continuously improved by highlighting its benefits, such as sentiment analysis, competitor tracking, and performance indicators.
For instance, Radarr is an all-in-one solution for brands to manage their online reputation through real-time social media monitoring, listening and sentiment analysis.
10. The right content strategy
Developing a solid content strategy is essential to preserve and advance your reputation. This strategy should include a thorough plan outlining the platforms to be used, the content kinds to be produced, and the publishing timetable. Ensure that all of your content accurately communicates your business’s messaging, guiding principles, and brand.
The production and dissemination of the content must be consistent. It gradually enhances your brand’s reputation by fostering audience dependability and trust. You may effectively communicate your brand’s message and uphold a positive reputation in the online community with a carefully planned content strategy.
11. Monitoring scope
It’s crucial to understand exactly what you need to keep an eye on when maintaining your reputation. This includes monitoring your social media, online, and offline channels. You might want to think about adopting monitoring technologies, such as media monitoring software or social media listening services, to make this process simpler.
However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that there can be practical restrictions, such as resource availability or financial restraints. Prioritizing your objectives and target audience will help you make the most of your monitoring efforts.
Monitor your online reputation the right way
Reputation management policies are vital recommendations for preserving the credibility of your business; they go beyond simply written documentation.
The ability to actively monitor online dialogues and keep up with market mood is provided by tools like Radarr, which can improve your reputation management efforts.
When we started building Radarr, our goal was to help brand marketers gather insights from social conversations in real time. With an objective to help them identify and predict trends to create campaigns that reach their audience and engage them in a meaningful manner, we knew we had to do our part too.
This meant using Radarr for what we recommend brands to use it for. So today, we decided to chat with our Insight Manager, Daffi Ranandi to see how he puts Radarr to work for Trend Analysis.
Using Radarr for Trend Analysis as an Insight Manager
What does your day to day as an Insight Manager look like?
Hi, everyone! This is Daffi Ranandi speaking, the Insight Manager from Radarr. I am based in Indonesia and have been working remotely for years now. I used to be a traditional market researcher, interviewing dozens of people and analyzing hundreds of questionnaires. But now I’m introduced to Radarr, I can do so much more!
Radarr is an extremely powerful social media listening solution – which means it can capture data and insights from social media posts across all platforms and topics in real-time. But making those insights actionable often requires another layer of analysis so that our clients know exactly how to put it to work. That’s what I do – I analyze the data collated by Radarr, infuse insights from further research, and provide our clients with a set of actionable recommendations.
Radarr dashboard makes it easy for me to spot a potential trend in the market.
How frequently do you use Radarr and what do you use it for the most?
I use Radarr daily to capture the necessary data from the internet. This data can be social media mentions of a specific brand, posts by brand accounts, e-commerce reviews of specific products, news articles on certain industries, and many more. We answered the client’s business objectives and research questions using these data points.
Latest conversation trend: Tharman Shanmugaratnam elected as the President of Singapore
Most of the time, our client wants to know what kind of trend is emerging in their industry so that they can be the first movers in the space. I analyzed all the data and searched for a sign or pattern indicating an upcoming trend in the client’s industry. While most use a social listening tool for identifying current trends, I feel using it to identify upcoming trends is like tapping into the opportunity before all the noise begins.
What’s the one feature of Radarr that you absolutely love as an Insight Manager?
Everyone loves tracking growth in mentions and virality, but my favorite feature of Radarr is its Sentiment Analysis. The sentiment analysis utilized AI to determine if a social mention has a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Accumulation of those data over time often leads me to discover a trend even before everyone else.
A sudden spike in positive sentiment indicates a strong potential trend
You see, some of the most long-lasting, highly impactful trends are usually indicated by an increase in positive mentions of the brand. As a pattern, we know that trending social media posts take very little time to gain market engagement, and this sudden increase in engagements is quickly (and clearly) captured as a spike on the Radarr dashboard.
While looking at the spikes gives you insight into the latest trends in your industry or target market, checking audience response tells you a lot about longevity – how long the trend is going to last. As an Insights Manager, it is important for me to guide our clients on what trends are worth investing in. Radarr’s insights make it easy to visualize data across platforms to evaluate whether a trend will be long-lasting or just a one-off fad.
What is the best part about this feature – something that helps you do something that you could not before?
It was SO DIFFICULT to read all of the posts’ comments and social media mentions and determine whether each post was talking about the good or the bad stuff of our client’s brand. Add to that the ever-changing meaning of reactions posted by their audience, and we never had a clear idea of what was successful ‘emotionally.’
Radarr Sentiment Analysis makes it so simple – our AI-powered engine is designed to analyze each post and comment in real time. With natural language processing, Radarr can understand the what, why, and how behind every engagement on social media, categorizing them into three key sentiments – positive, negative, and neutral.
To illustrate, one of our clients aimed to gauge the market’s reaction to their controversial campaign. The campaign sparked a heated debate on the internet. Our responsibility was to monitor all of the market’s feedback, including those who supported the campaign, those who opposed it, and the arguments they presented—doing this manually took hours of data tagging. But now, Radarr simply consolidates all the insights and shares a detailed sentiment analysis. This has helped brands with not just campaign planning, but also in making their campaign copy and creatives more enticing.
There are so many more exciting features in Radarr, each purposely designed to answer a brand’s market research-related questions. There is an influencer analysis chart, Impact score, word cloud analysis – the list goes on. If used methodically, all the features are like a treasure box for Insight Managers.
What’s the one thing you use Radarr for and not many know of?
I like to keep this on the down low, but I sometimes use Radarr to determine the trending, most discussed food lately. It’s so awesome to stay ahead of the curve and taste the excellent stuff BEFORE it goes viral! There’s no queue line, and the vendors have yet to increase their product price. As a foodie, that’s a win for me.
Had this before it went viral – of course, I have to take cholesterol medicine afterward…
If you’re an Insight Manager responsible for deep-diving into data to create campaigns based on market insights and response, it’s time to get Radarr on your side.
And if you’d like to know more about how Daffi is using Radarr for Trend Analysis, feel free to drop him an email on daffi.ranandi@radarr.com.
Today’s audience relies heavily on the internet to share positive and negative experiences, voice their opinions, and influence others. This makes it vital for businesses to actively engage in online reputation management to monitor and respond to feedback effectively.
Online reputation management software and services help businesses maintain a positive online image and protect their brand. These tools enable companies to promptly monitor and respond to customer feedback, address negative comments, and showcase their strengths.
However, to keep watch across multiple channels, you require the appropriate tool.
The following are the best reputation management tools to enhance your overall brand reputation and to keep you on top of your game.
List of the best online reputation management software
While there are plenty of tools and technologies that can help businesses with online reputation management, let’s take a look at some of the best:
1. Radarr
Radarr is a comprehensive social monitoring and online reputation management platform powered by AI, which helps you get better results quickly. You can gain a detailed analysis of your campaigns with the Al-powered social intelligence and analytics tool.
Radarr collects all digital conversations into a unified dashboard, which makes it easy for brands to understand their users. It helps brands gather real-time insights about their audience response, interests, and market trends.
Radarr helps businesses make real-time decisions using dashboards, data visualizations, and insights reporting. It tracks publicly available data across social media, news, blogs, forums, and social networks. It uses digital intelligence and social monitoring to visualize data with its command center and get consumer insights through Radarr Research.
Features:
Measure campaign ROI and reactions from your press releases
Crisis monitoring and real-time alerts
Identify top influencers and track key opinion leaders
Analyze sentiment
Track and predict trends
Monitor keywords and topics in real-time
Advanced sentiment analysis capabilities
Driven by cutting-edge NLP technology
Brings all online conversations from different digital platforms onto one dashboard
Mention is a robust reputation management tool for businesses and digital agencies designed to monitor and enhance their online image and perception. It empowers users to respond to positive and negative content swiftly, ensuring a proactive approach to online reputation management.
Features:
Sentiment analysis to measure customer sentiment
Customizable alerts for immediate response
Competitive analysis for benchmarking
In-depth analytics and reporting
Mobile app for on-the-go monitoring
3. Digimind
Digimind is an innovative reputation management tool that utilizes advanced AI-driven technology to monitor various online sources, including social media, news, blogs, and forums, providing real-time insights into brand mentions. Comprehensive analytics and customizable alerts allow users to make data-driven decisions, respond proactively to online chatter, and maintain a positive digital image.
Features:
Sentiment analysis for understanding public perception
Competitive benchmarking to gauge industry standing
Collaboration tools for team coordination
Integration capabilities with other software
Multilingual support for global reputation management
4. BirdEye
BirdEye is a comprehensive reputation management tool that integrates with over 3000 software, empowering businesses to monitor, analyze, and enhance online discovery. It offers several functionalities, like review management, generation, customer messaging, referral marketing, and online reviews.
Features:
Respond directly to consumer reviews, engage, and answer queries using a single inbox
Send automated, customized review requests to customers after every purchase
Enable brands to manage and respond to reviews, improving their reputation
Conduct automated surveys to collect customer feedback
5. Podium
Podium is an effective reputation management tool that streamlines the collection and management of customer reviews from multiple platforms, simplifying the process of responding to feedback. Its versatile features allow businesses to improve their online reputation, increase customer engagement, and make informed decisions.
Features:
Collects and manages reviews from various platforms
Sends automated review invitations to customers
Facilitates communication with customers via text
Provides insights into customer sentiment and trends
Manages multiple business locations from a single dashboard
6. Yext
Yext is a comprehensive digital data management platform that enables enterprises to manage and update critical business details, such as locations, hours, and contact information, across various digital channels, including search engines, directories, and social platforms. Yext ensures data accuracy and consistency, improving local search visibility and customer engagement.
Features:
Monitor, filter, and assess reviews from the web
Create reviews by sending requests to your customers
Gain access to analytical insights, like review analytics and sentiment analysis
Gain inputs on your competitors’ performance against you
7. Brandmentions
Brandmentions is a robust online reputation management software that tracks brand mentions in multiple languages, including social media, news, blogs, and forums. With sentiment analysis and real-time alerts, this tool helps brands quickly respond to customer feedback and manage their online image effectively.
Features:
Notifies users instantly about brand mentions with real-time alerts
Monitors competitors’ online mentions with competitor tracking
Provides insights into brand performance with analytics and reports
Provides access to historical data for trend analysis
Identifies key influencers discussing the brand
8. Trustpilot
Trustpilot’s transparent and user-friendly platform helps foster trust between customers and businesses, eventually driving growth and credibility in the digital marketplace. It allows users to leave reviews if they have purchased or interacted with a particular business, making it an excellent consumer resource for online reputation management services.
Features:
Solicit, gather, showcase, and analyze customer reviews
Display reviews on websites and marketing materials with TrustBox widgets
Respond to customer feedback and resolve issues with review management
Gain SEO benefits by improving search engine visibility with Trustpilot reviews
9. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an online reputation management software that merges tools for social media monitoring, marketing strategy building, and sentiment analysis. Its centralized customer profile hub lets brands identify and respond to comments immediately. It connects social media, reputation, and CX management, aiding marketers to map data, plan, execute, and test, all in one place.
Features:
Compile customer interactions in individual profiles
Customer profiles allow for highly targeted segmentation
Protect your brand in any emergency with crisis management
Rank mentions and messages by importance with a unique prioritization algorithm
10. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a resourceful reputation management tool that helps users monitor their online presence by tracking social engagement, content performance, and influencer outreach.
Features:
Identify key influencers in specific niches
Use competitor analysis to compare content strategies and performance
Highlight trending topics in real-time and build data-driven insights for content creation
Get notifications for specific keywords or topics with content alerts
Assess the quality and quantity of backlinks with the help of backlink analysis
11. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a valuable reputation management tool that monitors online content related to a specific keyword or brand, helping individuals and businesses stay informed about their online presence. By delivering real-time notifications whenever new content is published, Google Alerts enables users to track mentions, reviews, and news articles, facilitating quick responses.
Features:
Receive email notifications with real-time alerts when new content is found
Customize alerts for frequency and sources
Monitor news articles, blogs, forums, and more
Observe mentions of competitors using competitor analysis
Manage online reputation and image by addressing mentions promptly
12.Reputology
Reputology is a versatile reputation management platform that consolidates customer reviews, ratings, and feedback from diverse online sources, allowing for sentiment analysis. It offers real-time notifications, streamlining the response process to customer comments and concerns.
Features:
Monitors customer reviews and comments across various online platforms
Provides instant notifications for new feedback
Streamlines responses to customer comments and concerns
Compares reputation metrics with competitors
13. Reputation.com
Reputation.com is a cloud-based reputation management and CX tool that helps multi-location businesses track and enhance their online reputation by monitoring and optimizing customer feedback, reviews, traffic, and social media engagement. The tool has a machine learning-based AI program that offers customized references to improve the consumer experience.
Features:
Analyze customer feedback sentiment for insights
Ensures accurate business information across online directories
Collects feedback to improve products/services
Calculate reputation score in real-time
Provides data-driven recommendations for reputation enhancement
14. BrandYourself
BrandYourself is an online reputation management and personal branding platform that offers tools to enhance online visibility, suppress negative search results, and curate a positive digital presence. With features like website creation, social media optimization, and content development, BrandYourself helps users build a solid personal brand.
Features:
Boost your search engine rankings
Suppress negative content and push down unwanted search results
Create a professional online presence and ensure it maximizes your career opportunities
Generate and manage online content
16. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a versatile online reputation management software that empowers businesses to monitor social media, web, and news mentions in real-time, analyze sentiment, and track competitors. With customizable reporting and influencer identification, Mentionlytics provides valuable insights to enhance brand image and respond effectively to online conversations.
Features:
Generate detailed insights and shareable reports
Monitor online presence beyond social media
Filter and streamline the most critical information to manage your reputation
Use AI to pick out the most relevant content instead of swamping your inbox with every mention
17. Statusbrew
Statusbrew is an online reputation management software for enterprises to track mentions across social media platforms, analyze sentiment, and respond to customer feedback promptly. With real-time alerts and detailed analytics, Statusbrew aids in identifying reputation threats and opportunities for improvement.
Features:
Streamline posting and scheduling across multiple platforms
Track performance metrics and audience engagement
Understand your followers and their behavior
Track mentions and sentiment for brand image
18. Reputation Resolutions
Reputation Resolutions is an online reputation management service for resolving reputation attacks. With features like crisis management, content removal, and reputation monitoring, the tool offers personalized services to enhance your business reputation. It provides advanced tracking to pinpoint reputation issues, offers strategies for addressing negative content, and assists in promoting positive narratives.
Features:
Evaluates public perception
Offers insights for positive image building by providing actionable steps
Monitors interactions with stakeholders
Helps mitigate reputational crisis
19. dashClicks
DashClicks’ reputation management software enables businesses to monitor and manage reviews across different sources from a single dashboard. You can invite customers to leave reviews by sending emails and SMS so that they can share their feedback, which makes collecting reviews extremely easy.
Features:
Manage your reviews across multiple sources
Share your public review page with customers
Integrate Facebook reviews and Google My Business reviews
Track your average rating and best review sources
20. Meltwater
Meltwater’s reputation management tool offers real-time monitoring of social media, news, and review platforms, allowing companies to address potential issues and seize opportunities promptly. Its easy-to-use media intelligence services include media monitoring across print, broadcast, and podcasts.
Features:
News and Review Platform Tracking
Real-time monitoring of mentions
Advanced Sentiment Analysis
Historical Data Archive
Wrapping Up
Online reputation management is a critical aspect of digital life. It involves monitoring, controlling, and enhancing one’s online image.
In a world where information travels rapidly, managing your online reputation is vital for personal and professional success, trust-building, and maintaining a positive digital identity.
Online reputation management software does the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to use your time to run and grow your business. These tools are essential for maintaining a positive online presence in today’s interconnected world.
Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, our platform can monitor online conversations across the digital landscape, in real time. This gives you the ability to stay on top of conversations happening around you that could potentially hamper your reputation.
Our social analytics and sentiment analysis dashboard further helps streamline this data into actionables to improve your reputation.
Want to know more about online reputation management?
Social media has greatly changed how customer support is carried out today.
Around 67% of customers are using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X) etc. to seek customer support. This means that brands need to seriously consider social media customer service as the new way to resolve customer support issues.
In this post, we will be listing some of the best practices for social media customer service. Let’s dive in.
Best practices for social media customer service
Delivering good customer service on social media can be tricky. But here are some best practices you can follow:
1. Set expectations
Your social media customer service strategy has a lot of particularities to define from the beginning. This starts with questions like what time frame will you be available in a specific social media channel, or how will your response times be. You are setting expectations for customers by defining what your time goals are, or what your office hours are. It’s also important that you align your goals with the nature of the platform.
For example, Twitter (X) users might expect faster response times compared to other social media users. Let your audience know what to expect from you while ensuring that the expectations you set are respectable and reasonable.
2. Have a dedicated social media handle
If you are going to provide customer support on social media, it is highly advisable that you have a dedicated handle for it. Your social media marketing team might take longer to get to client queries compared to your dedicated customer service team.
On top of saving time and providing smoother responses, having a separate social media account for customer service can also help you screen service queries from your main channel.
3. Identify where your customers are
One of the crucial social media customer service practices will be that of finding where your customers are by running audits. You need to know which platform your customers are reaching you from and why.
Study how they are interacting with you on different platforms and how the nature of the interactions differs. This makes it easy to strategize your social media customer service based on how each social media platform is functioning for you.
4. Monitor comments across channels
After you get to know from which platforms your customers are reaching you, the next step would be to find comments about your company across channels. You can do this by setting up monitoring streams to find out when your company is mentioned in customer comments.
This way, you can go through the comments and easily resolve any complaints that the customer might have. Remember to look for both positive and negative comments and address them as required.
5. Provide faster responses
Ensure that your responses to customer queries are timely. Effective social media customer service means effective engagement and issue resolution. Customers often prefer to get quick responses and providing them with that hugely (and positively) impacts the impression they have about your company. No one likes to wait and a delayed response is a cause for frustration for customers, so avoid it to the maximum.
For instant responses to common queries, you can also employ templates and instant reply features common to platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
6. Personalize social media customer service interactions
A good social media customer service is inevitably one that has been able to offer positive customer experiences across channels.
Therefore, personalization is crucial in creating and fostering a positive atmosphere for customers, making them feel valued and ultimately building brand loyalty. Use the customer’s name, and other details wherever needed to make conversations more human and personal.
7. Check your tone of voice
The tone you use in your customer service interactions leaves an impression on customers. So, ensure that this is a positive impression. Do this with an empathetic and friendly tone when communicating with your customers. Empathy is key in customer service and by fine-tuning your tone to make customers feel at ease, you are also nurturing a positive brand perception.
8. Know when to take it offline
Though social media customer service is effective and efficient, not everything can be solved from a social media platform.
Some queries or customer issues that you get on your socials, might be complex and need a more hands-on approach. Depending on the nature of the issue, take it up in DM, email, call or via live chat.
9. Train your agents
Customer service over social media sounds like a simple concept but it is a little more complex than traditional ways of support, and handling it requires its own skill sets. This is why you need to invest in training people.
You can either train your support team on social media customer service practices or have a marketing professional as your social media support in-charge and train them.
10. Optimize for mobile users
Majority of users access their social media using smartphones or mobile devices. So it’s important that you optimize your social media service accounts and strategy for mobile-first users. To do this you can include easy response buttons, optimize font sizes and visual content for mobile screens, enable auto-fill etc.
11. Be proactive
If customers are coming to you with the same questions, that means that you need to have some resources on self-servicing; like FAQs and other educational materials.
Create dedicated how-to videos for customers to easily resolve simple issues, or have blog posts do the same. You can also post about common and known service issues on your social media service account.
12. Improve social listening
Even if they haven’t commented on your post or tagged you, they still might be discussing your company online. And often this is where you get insights into customer expectations.
Practice social listening, i.e., monitoring mentions about your brand on social media posts and networks, tracking relevant keywords and understanding customer expectations and sentiments. This is achievable by employing social media monitoring tools to provide you with these valuable insights.
13. Respond to everything
Respond to every single social media feedback, queries and comments. One customer query that got ignored can easily mean one customer lost.
Untended customer support queries can easily lead to negative reviews which will have a lasting impact on your company. Therefore, be frequent and consistent with your social media customer service responses.
14. Avoid getting defensive
While we have discussed that a positive tone of response is preferred, it is also important to note that any temptations to be defensive to criticism must be curbed. That is, never argue with customers.
Try not to hide information or act against critics as this reflects badly on the company. It’s always better to be transparent and accountable than to be defensive when faced with negative reviews.
15. Have a Shared Inbox
If you have different channels, using a shared inbox lets you automatically sync service interactions from all these channels into a single dashboard.
A shared inbox makes it extremely easy for your service team to view and react to all customer queries that reach their inboxes, subsequently making your customer support system work like a well-oiled machine.
16. Refer clients to additional support
Your social media support account will be one of your most accessible channels for customer support but this shouldn’t be your only channel. If you find yourself in a bind with huge volumes of service requests on your social media account, direct them towards additional support channels.
This can be email addresses, FAQ links, call center phone numbers and so on. The idea is to make it easier for your team to take on higher volumes of support queries without missing anything.
17. Leverage analytics
One of the golden rules for marketing success is monitoring almost everything. So unsurprisingly this is one of the best practices for social media customer service as well.
Monitor requests, tags, mentions, the performance of your posts, keywords, common topics on social pages, and everything else that will give you insights into how good of a customer service experience you are providing.
18. Build social media support guidelines
Besides training and prepping up your team, there should be a playbook of sorts, for them to work within. This should include your branding guidelines, what’s expected of your agents, guidelines for social media messaging, templates to use for common questions, and most importantly crisis management plans to combat any unexpected emergency situations.
19. Leverage automation
A high volume of customer queries on social media will certainly have your service teams’ hands full. This is why you need to employ automation wherever possible. Instead of leaving customers hanging, you can rely on automation to provide instant replies with auto-responses.
You can also automate follow-up messages and deploy chatbots with conversational AI for self-service.
20. Constantly look to improve
Customer expectations will keep on evolving so it’s crucial that your social media customer service should match up to it and strive to meet the rising expectations. Request feedback on customer service experiences, identify areas that require improvement and constantly rely on your insights to fine-tune your customer support.
Better Social Media Customer Service with Radarr!
So far, we have discussed some of the best customer service practices. It is also important that you provide social media customer service responses efficiently no matter what channel your customer reaches you from.
Radarr helps you monitor conversations across channels in real time, letting you actively track and engage all customer queries without fail. With advanced features like a comprehensive dashboard to pull in all conversations to setting up canned responses, you can do it all on Radarr.
If you want to make the most of social media, monitoring what your audience says about your products, competitors, industry, and the overall market is critical. You gain valuable insights you can use to understand your customers better and refine your marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, manually monitoring every single channel can be a drag. This is where social media monitoring tools save the day!
Social media monitoring tools collect and offer competitive insights for businesses looking to excel. But, if you’re not using the right one, you’re missing out on prospects to drive more leads, boost revenue, and enhance your brand profile.
Here are the best social media monitoring tools on the market that could take your brand’s marketing to the next level.
Best social media monitoring tools (2023)
While there are many tools out there addressing the social media monitoring needs of a brand, here are the ones that are chosen by global businesses:
1. Radarr
Radarr is a social and digital data analytics and consumer engagement platform specializing in social media monitoring using AI and machine learning technologies. It helps brands manage their reputation, monitor online conversations, and supervise real-time customer views. The AI-powered tool allows users to understand audience interests and responses and identify new trends.
Radarr’s crisis management dashboard enables the evaluation of customer sentiments and detects negative keywords.
Customer service teams can listen to and respond to problems in real-time. Marketers can excerpt data points from content and detect entities from various scripts written in multiple languages using the sentiment API.
Radarr’s features include campaign tracking, crisis monitoring, data visualization, forecasting, and benchmarking. It lets brands build a content strategy and assess the performance of social media campaigns. You can also track business health metrics and monitor KPIs through the dashboard. As a brand, you can also view the same analytics in charts with the chart cloning feature.
Radarr also comes with advanced features like image analytics. This function enables extending monitoring to conversations happening through visuals instead of text alone.
Features:
Monitor keywords and topics in real-time
Advanced sentiment analysis capabilities
Driven by cutting-edge NLP technology
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and other popular platforms
Brings all online conversations from different digital platforms onto one dashboard
Measure brand health, share of voice, ongoing and upcoming trends, competitor benchmarking, audience insights, industry gaps and opportunities
Audience and consumer analysis
Campaign analysis
Benchmark competitors
Identify and predict trends
Discover influencers
Track brand health and performance
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is best known for scheduling and streams, a centralized feed of all your brand’s mentions, tags, and comments across different social media channels. This makes it easy to filter, like, or reply to conversations and allocate items to people best suited to respond. With the help of its personal AI analyst, Iris, monitoring customer insights and brand mentions is just a few clicks away.
Features:
Monitors and manages mentions, comments, and messages across various social networks from a single interface
Creates and tracks the performance of advertising campaigns alongside your organic content
Gather articles from various RSS feeds in one place, making it convenient to post on your personal or business’s social networks
Tracks vital topics, trends, and social mentions according to keywords, locations, hashtags, and users
3. Brand24
Brand24 is one of the well-known monitoring tools with features that include sentiment analysis and instant notifications for all your social mentions. One prominent feature is its mention feed that detects spikes in activity. It can also detect trending hashtags related to your brand, and the summary feed makes it easier to monitor your brand’s PR efforts from week to week.
Features:
Tracks mention of your brand, products, or keywords across various social media platforms, news websites, blogs, and forums in real-time.
Analyzes customer sentiment and helps you assess your brand’s reputation and sentiment trends.
Tracks and compares your brand’s online presence with your competitors.
Access to detailed analytics and customizable reports
4. BrandWatch
Brandwatch’s customizable query builder can set it to track specific or extensive topics. It can monitor everything from your platforms to particular phrases, hashtags, and keywords you want to look at. It can build custom dashboards, views, and analytical components like customer sentiment, emotions, and demographics.
Features:
Real-time tracking and comprehensive coverage of online conversations
Powerful analytics and reporting tools that allow users to dive deep into data
Analyzes customer sentiments, tracks trends, and identifies key influencers
Monitors and benchmarks your brand against competitors
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that provides robust social monitoring, analytics, and customer support solutions.Its advanced social media analytics and monitoring can help streamline your marketing strategies with an all-in-one smart inbox.
Features:
Allows users to schedule and post content across various social media platforms.
Measures key metrics such as engagement, follower growth, and post reach.
Enable users to monitor brand mentions, hashtags, and relevant keywords across social media channels.
6. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo allows you to generate alerts for your brand mentions, products, and other related topics and keywords that influence your business. It allows you to search for up to 12 months of data, helping you understand what content has helped your brand the most.
Features:
Allows users to discover popular and trending content related to specific topics, keywords, or competitors
Filters results by content type, date, and social media engagement metrics
Enables users to identify and connect with influential individuals and content creators in their industry
Sets alerts to receive notifications when specific keywords or topics are mentioned online
7. Mention
Mention’s monitoring tools can help boost brand awareness, improve reputation, and build valued relationships. The tool integrates with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, allowing brands to interact and respond straight from the dashboard. It helps you find influencers, collaborate with your social team, and access analytics and reports.
Features:
Sets up alerts to receive notifications whenever their brand is mentioned in real-time
Tracks your competitors’ online activity, including mentions, engagement metrics, and social media performance
Engages with the audience directly through the Mention dashboard, responding to comments, messages, and mentions in one centralized location
8. Keyhole
Keyhole’s monitoring abilities can help you easily monitor whenever your brand’s name, products, or competitors are mentioned across social platforms and websites. The automated keyword and hashtag searches discover influencers posting about topics related to brands.
Features:
Provides insights into trending conversations and topics within their industry
Helps users track metrics such as engagement, reach, impressions, and sentiment analysis
Provides insights into competitor campaigns, allowing businesses to benchmark their performance against industry peers
Uses hashtag analytics to focus on influential accounts, posts, and discussions about any topic
9. Awario
Awario is a powerful social monitoring tool that focuses on building brand awareness. The platform helps businesses stay informed about mentions of their brand, products, or services across various online platforms.
Features:
Real-time monitoring of social media platforms, blogs, news websites, forums, and other online sources
Sentiment analysis to categorize mentions and gauge the overall sentiment around the brand
Tracks customer satisfaction and sentiment trends over time
Identifies top influencers by social network, compares various alerts, and analyzes progress using robust analytics
10. Meltwater
Meltwater is a comprehensive media intelligence platform that offers a variety of solutions to help brands monitor, analyze, and leverage their online presence. It empowers businesses with competitive intelligence, enabling them to benchmark their performance against competitors and identify growth opportunities.
Features:
Has multiple dashboards, including the ones that monitor, benchmark, and analyze your online activity
Filters out impertinent mentions and assigns sentiment to the mentions that matter
Carries out sentiment analysis on the results, determining whether each mention is positive, negative, or neutral
11. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management platform that allows businesses to have a unified inbox, publish on social media channels, use social monitoring, and evaluate insightful analytics. It offers content scheduling, publishing, and monitoring tools across various social media platforms.
Features:
Helps you take action by allowing you to click on a monitoring item and like, retweet, reply, or reply in DMs
Allows you to label, bookmark, and assign any monitoring item to a teammate or client
User-friendly content calendar that helps businesses plan and organize their social media content
12. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is an online brand monitoring tool that offers real-time monitoring of social media channels, news outlets, blogs, and other online sources, allowing users to track and analyze brand mentions and trends.
Features:
AI-powered image recognition for visual analysis
Multilingual sentiment analysis for global insights
Real-time alerts and crisis detection
Benchmarking and competitive benchmarking for industry comparisons
13. BrandMentions
Brandmentions is a powerful online brand monitoring tool that offers a complete set of features to help brands track and analyze their online presence. With its real-time monitoring abilities, Brandmentions scans the web, social media platforms, blogs, news outlets, and forums to identify brand mentions or keywords, enabling you to stay on top of your online reputation.
Features:
Real-time brand monitoring and mentions tracking
Sentiment analysis to gauge customer sentiment
Competitive analysis for benchmarking against competitors
Customizable alerts and reports for actionable insights.
14. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is an AI-powered social monitoring tool that offers real-time monitoring and analysis of online interactions. You can measure your brand’s online visibility and compare it with competitors to realize your market share.
Features:
Real-time social media monitoring
Sentiment analysis for brand mentions
Competitive intelligence and benchmarking
Customizable reporting and analytics
15. YouScan
YouScan is an image-first social monitoring tool. It captures written brand mentions and turns visual data like logos, backgrounds, and people in posts on social media, news, blogs, and forums into visual insights. This tool is apt to find more user-generated content, measure sponsorship ROI, and connect with valuable brand ambassadors.
Features:
Sentiment analysis
Image and video recognition for visual content monitoring
Trend analysis
Influencer identification to connect with key voices in social media
16. RivalIQ
RivalIQ is a comprehensive social media analytics platform focusing on competitive analysis to help brands monitor their competitors. RivalIQ can also identify when a competitor has changed their social media bio or when they boost an organic post as an ad.
Features:
In-depth competitive analysis
Comprehensive social media reporting tools, including data on engagement, content performance, and audience growth
Content recommendations and insights to improve social media strategies
Customizable dashboards to track key metrics and visualize data
17. Buffer
Buffer is a well-known social media management platform that simplifies scheduling, publishing, and analyzing content across various social media channels.Buffer lets you find the most important conversations and join conversations right away.
Features:
Detailed post-performance analytics
Tracking of engagement metrics, reach, and follower growth
Actionable insights for refining social media strategies
Streamlined social media management
18. Locobuzz
Locobuzz is a social media monitoring and customer experience management platform designed to help businesses monitor, analyze, and engage with their users and improve brand presence.
Features:
Analytics can be filtered by languages, locations, demography, and influencers
Advanced AI-driven chatbots
Automation capabilities for streamlined customer interactions
You can track customer sentiment over time
Choosing the Best Social Media Monitoring Tool
Building brand awareness is the north star for businesses today, so it is crucial to monitor social media to gauge your audience’s sentiments toward your brand.
However, you need the right social media monitoring tool to help you extract data and gain helpful insights. The efficiency of these tools depends on your specific needs, the social media platforms you want to monitor, and your budget.
Step up your social media monitoring with Radarr, trusted by leading brands across various social media platforms and multiple languages.
