Consumers today depend on the Internet to search for and choose local companies to do business with. This is why your agency’s clients must make it a priority to build and maintain a strong online reputation (along with well-managed local listings) in order to acquire and retain customers in a competitive market.
- According to local SEO statistics, all Google searches are for local information.
One key factor that will determine your agency’s success is how you balance online reputation management with your brand’s social media marketing strategy. In today’s competitive agency landscape, agency solutions like social media and reputation management often go hand in hand.
To help your agency deliver to clients the most value for your social media and reputation management solutions, we highlighted a few best practices.
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How Social Media Reputation Impacts Brand Reputation
Review management + social media marketing helps develop and protect your agency clients’ brand reputation.
Best Practice 1: Identify Social Media Sites and Business Review Sites — and Claim Client Listings
Social media is earned media, and success requires listening. But for your clients to be able to listen to their customers and target audience, they must know where these conversations are taking place.
This is why it’s so critical that your agency offers a local listing management solution. This allows you to claim your clients’ listings on all the possible and relevant sites, channels, and platforms.
Your clients may already have a business Page on Facebook as well as branded profiles on Twitter and Instagram. But don’t stop there. Plant their flags, too, on online review sites and other social apps: Yelp, Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business), Tripadvisor, Apple Maps, to name a few.
Once you’ve done that, identify and claim your clients’ online listings on niche-specific sites where more customers may be talking — for example: OpenTable for restaurants, Cars.com for automotive businesses, and Vitals and Healthgrades for medical providers.
With a local listing management solution, your agency can effortlessly claim client listings that will improve their visibility. More importantly, you’ll be able to build clients’ capacity to listen and engage on social media, whenever necessary.
Best Practice 2: Empower Clients to Respond to Reviews
There is no reason to fear the Voice of the Customer. While negative social media comments and one-star reviews can sometimes feel like a punch in the gut, you and your clients have to face customer feedback head on.
The savviest brands know that, in order to succeed on social media, you have to develop meaningful relationships with fans and followers. Responding to reviews is a great way of doing just that.
Empower your clients with tools and resources on how to respond to negative reviews. Be sure to also offer positive review response examples.
Investing in white-label reputation management by ReviewTrackers should help your agency grow clients’ online reputation. The online reputation management software offers an award-winning set of review management features for helping brands monitor, analyze, and respond to reviews and unsolicited feedback.
Best Practice 3: Identify and Resolve Customer Issues Raised on Social and in Reviews
Online review management and social listening — as an agency solution — give you and your clients access to actionable insights about the customer experience.
Social media has transformed how businesses handle complaints and respond to customers’ needs and expectations. Outside of Facebook and Twitter, the voice of the customer can also be heard on community-based, review-driven platforms.
If your clients aren’t already providing “social” care and support, here’s something to consider: Nielsen found that close to 50% of consumers use social media to ask questions, report satisfaction, or make complaints.
Again, don’t limit your agency to offering services for just Facebook and Twitter; extend the scope of your efforts to include business review sites. That way, your agency and your clients can see the bigger picture and more effectively identify and resolve customer issues, while also creating new opportunities to foster customer loyalty and win lifelong fans.
Best Practice 4: Leverage Customer Feedback and Review Data for Insights
Just like user-generated content on social media, unsolicited feedback and data from online reviews can be harnessed to help your agency discover and interpret key client insights on what and how customers think.
A customer experience analytics solution should also support the objectives of your social media strategy by tapping into your clients’ precious review data.
Why is this important? Review data contains a wealth of information that’s crucial to making smart business decisions, such as those involving product and service improvements, value perception, reputation management, pricing flexibility, and competitive benchmarking.
With a natural language processing tool, your agency can bring to the surface the most relevant keywords used in clients’ online reviews. This, in turn, helps teams make sense of massive amounts of feedback, as well as crystallize valuable customer information into insights — helping achieve a more accurate, complete, and unified view of the customer.
Best Practice 5: Amplify Clients’ Positive Feedback.
Behind some of the savviest brands on social media are organizations that demonstrate a commitment to creating a customer experience culture.
If clients are successfully driving customer engagement on social media, if they’re generating 5-star reviews across the board, if their profiles are flourishing with hearts and likes and favorites, help them amplify this type of feedback and reinforce the positives.
According to customer reviews data, 40% of online consumers use social networks to look up new brands or products. By leveraging great reviews and feedback to grow your clients’ reputation on social media, you can give their consumers the confidence to purchase from the brand.
Final Thoughts
Your clients depend on your agency’s expertise to build their online presence and grow revenue.
When it comes to agency solutions such as social media reputation management, agencies need to know how to do it right. Social media management must go beyond posting promotional updates on key channels. Today, it’s essential to understand best practices on social media and reviews to help your clients improve their online reputations as well as acquire and retain more customers.
Your agency can help clients monitor social reviews with ReviewTrackers and Hootsuite.
With ReviewTrackers and Hootsuite, your clients can improve their online reputation and drive revenue by managing reviews and social media mentions, all from one place.
