Reputation Management Software

What is reputation management software?

Reputation management software helps businesses monitor and influence their online reputation. It tracks what people say about businesses on social media, blogs, and third-party review websites. This software will alert users if there's positive or negative feedback about their business via alerts and a built-in dashboard.

Reputation management provides tools to respond to reviews and comments directly from the platform, helping manage and address customer feedback. The software allows users to customize their dashboards according to their preferences. This may include choosing specific key performance indicators (KPIs), arranging tracking widgets, or setting up alerts for particular events. 

Its features often include sentiment analysis and targeted monitoring, which help understand consumer attitudes better. Using such a program effectively can foster stronger customer relationships and help businesses address and resolve online customer queries faster.

What are the core features of reputation management software?

• Review monitoring: Monitors online reviews and feedback about a business on various platforms. With this feature, businesses can identify negative and positive comments to respond quickly and appropriately, thereby managing their reputation effectively.

• Social media monitoring: Monitors various social media platforms for mentions of a brand, products, or services. It tracks and analyzes public sentiments to help businesses understand their online reputation. Users can leverage these insights to improve customer service responses, manage crises, and tailor marketing strategies accordingly.

What are the benefits of using reputation management software?

• Monitors online brand mentions: A reputation management tool monitors all mentions of a brand across various online platforms. It enables users to stay informed about what customers say about their business in real time, respond promptly if necessary, and manage any potential damage swiftly before it escalates further. It helps maintain a positive public perception of the brand.

• Manages customer feedback effectively: Reputation management software allows businesses to collect and manage customer feedback by consolidating reviews and comments from various platforms into one dashboard. It enables timely responses and aids in identifying recurring issues for improvement. The software also highlights positive testimonials that can be leveraged for marketing purposes.

• Boosts positive online visibility: Reputation management software helps boost positive online visibility by monitoring and influencing a brand's digital reputation. It promotes good reviews, manages negative feedback, improves SEO rankings, and ensures accurate business information across multiple platforms. This results in improved public perception, enhancing a business's image online.

What are the potential issues with reputation management software?

• Inaccurate data analysis: If the tool fails to analyze online review sentiment correctly or misinterprets customer feedback (for instance flagging ‘this business is ridiculously helpful’ as a negative review), businesses could make wrong decisions based on such information. This might lead to ineffective strategies for public image improvement and further loss of trust among customers.

• Response limitations: Automated response features may be limited and not adequately address complex or nuanced customer feedback. Such inappropriate or generic responses may damage customer relationships, especially if concerns aren't addressed effectively.

• Limited language support: Reputation management tools may not adequately support multiple languages or dialects. In global or multilingual contexts, sentiment analysis may be less accurate, potentially missing important feedback from non-English-speaking communities.

How much does reputation management software cost?

Most reputation management software products are priced on a “per month” basis, and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $10 to $289+*. An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as customer review invites, a widget library, and priority support.  

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of November 9, 2023.

What is reputation management software used for?

• Crisis management: When negative events or crises occur, such as a negative review or a tweet, reputation management software can assist in monitoring and managing the situation, responding to negative mentions, and formulating a crisis communication strategy. The software provides a centralized platform for managing responses to online mentions and addressing concerns raised during a crisis. Quick and appropriate responses can mitigate the impact of negative sentiment and demonstrate a commitment to addressing issues.

• Sentiment analysis: Reputation management software employs natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to categorize online content into different sentiment categories, namely positive, negative, and neutral. The software assigns sentiment scores to each piece of online content to quantify the intensity of sentiment. These scores are often on a numerical scale, with positive content having high scores, negative content having low scores, and neutral content falling in between.

• Competitor analysis: Reputation management tools can analyze how competitors handle similar crises. This competitive analysis provides insights into effective crisis management strategies and helps businesses differentiate their approach. Reputation management tools allow businesses to benchmark their reputation metrics against their competitors. This includes comparing overall sentiment, review ratings, and other key performance indicators to assess relative strengths and weaknesses.

Which software tools integrate with reputation management software?

• Facebook, a social networking platform, also offers integrational support to reputation management software. Reputation management solutions integrated with Facebook can monitor and analyze the activity, mentions, and comments related to a brand or individual on the platform. This provides a more comprehensive view of the online presence and reputation, as Facebook is a major source of user-generated content and discussions.

• Shopify is an online eCommerce software that integrates with reputation management software. Shopify integration allows reputation management software to access and aggregate data related to customer reviews, ratings, and other eCommerce interactions directly from the platform. This centralized data management simplifies the process of monitoring and managing online reputation.

• Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, also offers integrational support to reputation management software. For businesses using Salesforce for lead management, reputation management software can help track the impact of online reputation on lead generation and conversion. This enables businesses to optimize their reputation management strategies to drive sales.

• Microsoft PowerBI is a data visualization platform that provides valuable insights into an organization's reputation, customer feedback, and overall brand perception. The software typically collects data from various sources, including social media, review platforms, and customer surveys and creates charts and graphs to showcase the data in a meaningful way.

Key considerations when purchasing reputation management software

• Look for solutions that offer customizations. The ability to customize dashboards allows you to tailor the tool to your specific needs, focusing on the key metrics and data points that matter most to your business. For instance, if there are specific social media channels you’d like to monitor more closely, keeping certain demographics in mind, the software should allow you to do that. 

• Assess social media integration and management. Social media platforms are a significant source of user-generated content such as customer opinions and feedback. Therefore, reputation management software must integrate with social media for real-time monitoring and responses. It can help businesses manage their online presence effectively, react swiftly to negative reviews or comments, maintain brand image consistency across channels, and highlight positive user-generated content on their websites for better search engine rankings.

• Determine the effectiveness of its competitor analysis functionality. By monitoring and analyzing the online reputation of your competitors, you gain valuable insights into how your business stacks up against others in your industry. An ideal solution should offer different types of analyses, such as a comparative analysis between you and your competitors, a trend analysis that tracks trends in competitors’ online reputation over time and identifies patterns and shifts, and content analysis.

Sources

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from GetApp's reputation management software directory and sorted by the number of reviews. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in GetApp's directory that offer them. 

Disclaimer

This reputation management software buyers guide was authored by GetApp's content team. We develop our guides using the author's expertise, insights from 2M+ unique user reviews, and our proprietary data science algorithms to identify trends in user sentiment, preferences, and priorities. Some text was generated with assistance from artificial intelligence tools.