When it comes to your business, your online reputation is everything. Customers and clients are more likely than ever to check out what others are saying about you on social media before making a purchase or working with you. That’s why it’s so important to have a social media reputation management tool in place that can help you keep track of what’s being said about your business online, and take action if necessary.
We review the key features and capabilities you should look for when choosing a social media reputation management tool for your business and how Symanto AI can give you accurate and transparent insights so you can stay on top of what people are saying about your brand on social media. With each point we demonstrate how Symanto AI is the best-in-class solution.
Finally we round up 7 social media reputation management platforms to help you make an informed decision about which one is right for your business.
Social Media Reputation Management Tools: Key Features
1. Sentiment Analysis
All social media reputation management tools include this feature. Sentiment analysis is the process of automatically identifying and categorising opinions expressed in text as positive, negative, or neutral.
Most social media reputation management tools use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to analyse text and extract opinion-based phrases. Once the sentiment of a phrase has been determined, it can be categorised as positive, negative, or neutral.
Aspect-based sentiment goes a step further by analysing not only the sentiment of a phrase but also the topic that the phrase is about. This can be helpful in understanding how people feel about specific topics related to your brand.
For example, while your customers might rave about the features of your product, they might have negative sentiments towards the pricing, or customer service.
But, beware! Not all tools use the same NLP algorithms. This means that there can be a vast variation in the accuracy of sentiment analysis between different tools.
At Symanto , we conduct world-leading research into Natural Language Processing. Our tools are updated with cutting-edge AI to accurately analyse text for sentiment and, as you will discover as you read on, other important features.
2.Emotion analysis
While sentiment analysis comes as standard in many social media reputation management tools, emotion analysis is a more specialised, more advanced feature that can help you understand the emotions people are feeling when they talk about your brand on social media.
Reviews and comments that use highly emotive language are the most urgent ones to track. Customers who are dissatisfied with your product or service and use emotive language are at greater risk of churning, and if not addressed quickly, they may successfully dissuade others from using your product. At a time when 90% of customers read reviews before making a purchase, you can’t afford to let a few negative comments go unaddressed.
Social media reputation management tools that include emotion analysis can help you to quickly identify and take action on these types of comments before they have a chance to do damage to your brand.
Conversely, posts that use positive emotions can be quickly identified and amplified to create a halo effect for your brand.
At Symanto , we use a state-of-the-art emotion detection algorithm that is able to accurately detect key emotions: joy, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. You can also use this algorithm to compare the number of emotionally connected customers for your brand with those of your competitors and understand how this affects your business.
3. Brand Recommendation
Are people promoting your brand, detracting from it or are they indifferent to it? You might think that positive sentiment and brand recommendation scores are the same thing, but they’re not.
A brand recommendation score measures how likely it is that someone will recommend your brand to others. It’s a good way to measure word-of-mouth marketing for your business.
This feature will help you track and measure the number of people who are recommending your brand on social media. If you see a sudden decrease in recommendations, it could be an indication that something is wrong and you need to take action.
With Symanto AI, you can get a brand recommendation score by analysing text for key emotions and phrases that express a positive or negative attitude towards recommending your brand. Discover how your brand fares compared to your competitors, and track changes over time to understand the impact of your marketing campaigns.
4. Competitor Tracking
In order to protect and grow your social media reputation, it’s important to keep an eye on what people are saying about your competitors. Social media reputation management tools that include competitor tracking can help you to do just that.
Competitor tracking can help you quickly and easily see how your brand is performing in comparison to your competitors. It’s a valuable way to benchmark your brand against others in your industry and to understand where you might be losing ground.
Because of the way Symanto collects and tracks social media data, it’s very easy to get like-for-like insights into your brand peers and understand how you’re performing against them. Not only that, but you can track changes over time to see the impact of your marketing campaigns, and understand what’s working well for your competitors.
5. Customer Loyalty
It’s another important metric to track, but you might not have considered social media as a source of data for measuring customer loyalty. Typically, customer loyalty is measured by the number of repeat customers on your website, but without some serious (and illegal) sleuthing, you won’t be able to reliably compare customer loyalty with your competitors for benchmarking.
With Symanto , you can measure customer loyalty with social media data. Using a combination of emotional analysis, psychographics and sentiment analysis, our technology identifies four key consumer types and then measures what portion of your social media audience is made up of each type.
The four key types are:
- Loyalists: the most emotionally connected to the brand/product/service and tend to be the most loyal customers.
- Ambassadors: tend to be great advocates as their opinions are expressed in a positive and rational manner that can greatly influence other customers by comparing the product/service against competitors.
- Critics: unsatisfied due to rational and logical reasons. These customers are easily won-round if their issues are addressed promptly
- At-risk: the most frustrated customers. They tend to share their frustration rather than their opinion and can be highly influential for other emotional customers.
This information is invaluable for assessing your brand’s reputation on social media, and it has direct implications on your customer service strategy in order to improve loyalty and reduce customer churn. If you can identify which customer types are at-risk or unsatisfied, you can take steps to address their concerns before they negatively influence other consumers.
6. Multiple channel analysis
There’s no use in tracking your brand’s reputation on just one social media platform. You need to be able to see what people are saying about you on all of the major platforms.
Depending on your business model, you will also need to track what people are saying away from traditional social media channels too. For example, review sites, industry blogs and forums: wherever you anticipate people mentioning your brand.
Symanto technology can automatically crawl thousands of data entries from major review sites. Our analysts are on hand to help gather data from bespoke sources, such as forums and blogs, so you can be sure you’re getting a comprehensive view of your brand’s reputation online.
7. Multiple languages
If you have a global audience, it’s also essential to make sure that your social media reputation management tool can track and measure sentiment in multiple languages.
At Symanto , our technologies are compatible with over 50 languages. This means that you can get accurate insights into how people feel about your brand, no matter where they are and what language they communicate in.
8. Security and privacy
When you’re dealing with sensitive customer data, it’s important to know that your social media reputation management tool is secure and private.
Our products and services are GDPR compliant and we take data security very seriously. We use the latest technologies to protect our customers’ data, and our team is constantly working to improve our security measures.
7 Social Media Reputation Management Tools
For all the reasons listed above, Symanto is a step ahead of its competitors when it comes to getting accurate and meaningful insights to understand and manage your social media reputation.
There’s a difference between positive sentiment and brand loyalty. Understanding what your customers feel towards your brand is essential for social media reputation management. With Symanto, you can measure customer loyalty with social media data using a combination of emotional analysis, psychographics and sentiment analysis.
This three-dimensional take on consumer intelligence and audience profiling better equips you to be able to respond in a personalised, meaningful way to your audience. It empowers you to focus your resources on your most valued and valuable customers, preventing churn and promoting loyalty through social media.
Symanto is a great option for social media reputation management but it is not a content management tool. You’ll still need to use other tools to help you create and publish content, but Symanto will give you the insights you need to ensure that your content resonates with your audience on the deepest level.
Podium is a neat little social media reputation management tool for small, local businesses in automotive and retail industries. It’s optimised for delivering super-fast response rates to customer reviews and queries, which is essential for maintaining a good reputation. It centralises all communication channels, including social media, review sites and messenger apps, so you can respond quickly and easily.
However, as your business scales you might miss features such as sentiment analysis and multi-language support.
Brandwatch is a social media management reputation tool that offers some basic sentiment analysis, brand mentions and share of voice metrics for competitor analysis. It also offers a centralised hub for managing your content output across different social media channels allowing your team to manage and monitor your brand’s reputation from one place.
Brandwatch’s NLP purportedly analyses text in over 50 languages, however, reviewers consistently report that the sentiment accuracy is poor for languages besides English. Some also state that many sentiments are not understood in context.
Brand24 is a social media reputation management tool that offers real-time alerts for when your brand or keywords are mentioned online. It’s optimised for quickly identifying and responding to negative sentiment before it escalates. It also offers some basic competitor analysis metrics, including share of voice and social media reach.
One downside of Brand 24 is that it doesn’t offer any extensive reporting features, so if you need to generate detailed reports for clients or senior management, there are more suitable options on the market.
Hootsuite’s social media reputation management platform now offers a reputation monitoring tool called Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch (mentioned above). It’s designed to help you track, measure and respond to your brand’s reputation across social media and the web.
Hootsuite Insights is optimised for quickly identifying negative sentiment and responding to it before it escalates. It also offers some basic analysis features, such as share of voice. However, Hootsuite remains, first and foremost, a content management tool, and as such, it is not that focussed on delivering detailed reports.
If you’re after a tool that offers deep audience analysis you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.
Meltwater is a social media reputation management tool that offers a centralised platform for managing your brand’s presence across social media and news sites. It also provides detailed analysis of your brand mentions, including competitor comparisons, share of voice and sentiment analysis.
However, Meltwater’s sentiment analysis has been criticised for miscategorising content. As one reviewer describes:
“We work on negative topics (diseases), so most content is marked as negative when in fact we may be announcing something that will help fight those diseases.”
At Symanto, we offer industry-specific models to prevent these kinds of miscategorisations and bring you the most accurate insights possible.
Sprout is a social media content scheduling platform that offers basic reporting features and some limited competitor analysis capabilities such as share of voice and basic sentiment analysis features. However, it’s clear that insights and analysis are a secondary focus for Sprout, with the main emphasis being on content creation and scheduling.
Get Started With Symanto
If you’re after social media reputation management tool that can give you accurate insights and useful metrics, we have the solution for you. We offer a range of products and services for gathering and analysing consumer data on social media, review sites and beyond. Depending on your industry and your specific needs, we can guide you to the best Symanto solution for you. Get in touch today, to find out more.
