Online reputation management

Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of establishing and managing a positive perception of a business. It includes encouraging positive reviews, tracking brand mentions, and responding to users’ comments on social media, product review websites, and other platforms. ORM enables you to improve the perception of your brand, foster trust, build credibility, establish visibility, gain authority, and boost sales.

In this article, we’ll explain the importance and benefits of online reputation management and show you how to manage it. We’ll also review the types of online reputation management strategies, the five best tools, and effective tips.

Why is online reputation management important?

A positive impression online is a must for every business that strives to be successful. Online brand reputation management (ORM) helps you shape how the audience perceives your brand. Besides a positive attitude towards your company, you can establish trust and credibility and build authority in your market. However, a good ORM isn’t just a perfect image on social media. Your team’s global work covers all channels through which you broadcast your message. Product review websites, online communities, social platforms, and other online places for open discussions can influence your company. That’s why you need to develop a strategy that will cover all these channels and monitor information about your product and brand in general.

Establishing and maintaining a positive narrative about your company can be challenging, but with the right online reputation management strategy, it's entirely possible. For example, if you have a dissatisfied customer, you might lose their business. However, the situation becomes much more problematic if that person leaves a negative review on sites like TripAdvisor, Amazon, or Yelp or posts a comment on your social media. These reviews can seriously affect your brand’s reputation, credibility, transparency, and authority.

To prevent this, ORM is used. With its help, you can instantly track all brand mentions, respond to negative comments, and solve customer issues immediately. This proactive approach helps you avoid complex consequences impacting your business's profitability and reputation.

By demonstrating genuine care and promptly addressing customer concerns, you can turn negative comments into an advantage. Responding to criticism, presenting your case, acknowledging mistakes, and resolving issues when needed builds trust and transparency and can even boost sales.
Now that you know why online reputation management is essential, it’s time to discover its benefits.

Benefits of Online Reputation Management

Every business needs strong online reputation management. When done properly, it can deliver numerous benefits. Here are some of the key ones.

• Improved brand awareness. With a well-executed and consistent online reputation management strategy, you can improve your search engine rankings. Since search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo prioritize quality, maintaining a strong brand reputation is key to increasing your visibility and reaching a broader audience. This can be achieved more quickly when you develop a solid ORM strategy. It’s especially crucial on social media platforms, where a positive brand reputation can attract more customers to your brand.
• Higher level of trust and credibility. Online reputation is key in building trust and shaping a positive perception of your company. By fostering positive reviews, ratings, and feedback from customers and making them visible to potential clients, you can significantly influence purchasing decisions. A business with a strong online reputation generates far more impressions and conversions.
• Stronger customer relationships. Reacting to users’ comments, DMs, and Story replies on social media and answering customer questions through email, live chat, or messenger contributes to a better customer experience with your business, overall satisfaction, loyalty, and trust. When you provide your prospective customers with full support online, they are more likely to engage with your company. This will result in more clients sticking to your brand and becoming your brand advocates. They will refer their friends and participate in your loyalty programs.
• Better SEO ranking. Google appreciates brands with a good reputation, which is influenced by many factors, including content quality, reviews, your website’s usability, customer support, the product itself, and many others. When you have a good website with many useful resources, informative articles, and engaging videos, you are more likely to emerge on top of search results.
• Visibility of your expertise. Now, when everything goes online, it’s essential to ensure your business is there, too. Sharing valuable information on your social media and website helps you establish credibility. Online channels are your main way of showcasing your expertise to people who might be interested in your product.

It’s time to figure out how to manage your online reputation to reap the above benefits. The next section will help you maximize your efforts and move in the right direction.

Since managing an online reputation can be an overwhelming task for those who haven’t experienced it yet, we’ll guide you through the process step by step. Below are instructions on properly managing your reputation.

1. Analyze your online reputation. The first step you should take is to research your brand reputation. During this audit, you need to find out what people say about your company and product. This way, you’ll be able to figure out what works for them and what isn’t doing well. Check out all the channels you use: social media networks, your website, and third-party sites. Find all the necessary information by opening an incognito browser window and searching for your brand name, its ratings, reviews, and comments. You can find the information faster using a special monitoring tool like Semrush or Social Searcher. After collecting all the data, you can conclude how customers perceive your company.
2. Develop a strategy. When creating an online reputation strategy, identify the areas that need improvement. Focus on the most urgent tasks first. Managing your online reputation across multiple channels can take time, so it’s critical to establish rules and create guidelines. Communication guidelines ensure employees remain consistent and use the same brand voice across all platforms. They also help prioritize tasks when multiple team members are involved. By developing these guidelines, you can teach your team how to respond to customer comments, reviews, and feedback. Define which tasks require immediate attention and which can be addressed later. Build your brand’s tone of voice and include it in your guidelines. Content creators and managers should know how to write articles and responses that align with your company’s voice.
3. Keep an eye on brand mentions. Every brand owner should know what people say about their company. Monitoring brand mentions allows you to respond to customers’ negative reviews quickly and prevents the problem from escalating. If you take too long to answer, it might influence your reputation. There are two ways to track brand mentions: Google Alerts and specialized social media monitoring tools. Consider setting up Google Alerts for your company name and receiving emails once new results are related to your topic. You can also use specialized tools like Sprout Social, Brandwatch, or Mentionlytics. These platforms save you from searching websites for and analyzing your brand mentions. Social media networks cover statements in blog posts, social media posts, news articles, and forum comments.
4. Develop a crisis management strategy. A crisis can happen at any time with any business. To deal with any problems that might arise, you need to develop a crisis management strategy. The strategy should cover the steps team members should take to overcome specific problems and address how to respond to social media mentions. When developing a crisis strategy, consider using social monitoring platforms, tracking industry trends, identifying the most powerful channels, assigning tasks to those responsible for specific areas, and drafting responses.
5. Encourage clients to leave their reviews and comments on your product. You need positive customer feedback to gain trust, credibility, and authority. Besides, you’ll be able to establish an online presence and increase visibility. Ensure your clients can leave reviews on product review websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Prospects will notice positive feedback from previous customers when considering your product. Good customer reviews influence leads’ decisions and encourage them to make purchases. Allow clients to leave comments under product cards on your website. Ask them for a review once they receive and try your product. You can send an email campaign reminding them about feedback. Consider creating a professional email campaign with SendPulse in minutes.
6. Take care of negative reviews. Since negative feedback prevents prospects from choosing a product, it’s essential to manage it. First, you need to identify the level of urgency in your response. Address negative feedback that emerges at the top of the SERP. Search for negative reviews on all platforms where your company appears: Google Business Profile, social media, Trustpilot, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and many others. Secondly, once you find all the negative feedback, respond to the most problematic ones first. Answer comments quickly and be polite. You need to show your respect and care for clients, striving to solve their problems. If your company is responsible for the issue, acknowledge your mistakes and say you’ll resolve the problem immediately. Answer comments under your posts on social media to address issues in public. This will show potential customers that you are approachable.
7. Brand your content and stay consistent with it. All the content you share on your website, social media, and third-party websites should comply with your branding. Your messaging and brand tone of voice should be the same everywhere. Branding makes your company recognizable. Branding covers all aspects of your business, including branded searches, responses to customer feedback, communication on social media networks, and responses on Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Trustpilot.
8. Partner with the right opinion leaders. When collaborating with influencers, keep in mind both your reputation and theirs. Choose opinion leaders wisely, considering their reputation as well. Their mistakes can hurt your online brand reputation. Since you can’t control the content of individual posts, it may pose a problem in the future. For instance, there have been many scandals connected to celebrities posting inappropriate and sometimes very offensive content. The brand can also become a victim of such scenarios.

Besides being able to manage your online reputation, you should also know how to make it better using special platforms and strategies. In the next section, you’ll find 10 ways to establish a positive online presence and influence customers’ opinions about your business. Later, we’ll also introduce the tools that will help you bring your ideas to life.

There are plenty of ways to manage your online reputation using various strategies. Some of them might work better than others, and that’s why we’ll share them with you. Let’s explore.

Organizing a webinar with recognized experts

By hosting a webinar or any other online event with professionals in the industry, you can attract more people to your brand. These experts will bring your business extra exposure by sharing the news on their social media and increasing the audience. Besides providing valuable knowledge and skills to participants, they can tell more about your company and your products. This way, more prospects will discover your solution and consider it for solving their problems.

Below is one of the webinars hosted by the Digital Marketing Institute. The company invites people to explore “Trends in Digital Marketing in 2025” by listening to three experts who discuss the rise of alternative social platforms and the impact of AI on content creation.

Building an online community

When you create an online community, you establish a platform for direct customer interaction. You can always provide them with answers, some essential information, and more details about your product. Moreover, this enables your clients to access all the materials they need seamlessly and quickly. Two-way communication contributes to understanding your customers’ needs and showcasing your product from a better perspective. With an online community, you’ll attract more loyal customers who share positive feedback about your brand.

Below, you’ll find a YouTube channel with yoga classes where students can share their comments and receive responses. By having a community, this yoga teacher can better understand the audience and their preferences.

Encouraging user-generated content

Consider encouraging your customers to share positive reviews of your products by creating various social media content formats, including Reels, posts, Stories, and more. You can create a branded hashtag to help you find this user-generated content. Show your clients appreciation for their word-of-mouth promotion by reposting their content and replying with encouraging words. The more people see that you care, the more they will share their positive feedback. This will result in higher visibility and reach, bringing more conversions for your business.

Let’s look at the user-generated content by a microblogger advocating for Dior’s products. This influencer shares the beauty products from the new collection she’s using. She tags the business and uses branded hashtags the company will definitely notice.

Using influencer marketing

Influencer marketing plays an important role for many businesses. It affects brand recognition, reputation, visibility, and reach. Finding the right opinion leaders in your industry and collaborating with them for brand promotion is great when these influencers have an active audience that listens to them. When they recommend your products to such followers, your business will achieve a higher reach, more impressions, and better conversions. Moreover, influencer marketing encourages trust and lets you stay on top of followers' minds.

Below, you can see how Dua Lipa promotes Puma and its sportswear. The singer’s huge following enables the brand to reach more people and encourage them to choose the company over competitors.

Sharing testimonials on your website

When you showcase positive customer feedback on your website, you can boost trust in your brand and improve your reputation. Since prospects often look through review platforms and search for feedback, it would be great to include those testimonials on your own website. They will allow you to demonstrate that some people have successfully solved their problems with the help of your product.

Let’s take a look at Mention’s website. On its landing page, you can see customer testimonials, including their experiences with the platform. By listing the benefits of the service, these clients encourage prospects to make faster purchasing decisions and develop deeper trust in the business.

Incorporating loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are an effective way to promote your business. When customers remain loyal to your brand, they appreciate your product and everything you do. Rewarding existing customers with various perks will help encourage them to stay with your company. You can offer them incentives that your audience will find interesting. Furthermore, when you reward consumers, they may write a product review.

For example, MAC Cosmetics’ reward program assigns customers points and discounts after they complete their first purchases, write product reviews, and have birthdays. After they receive a specific amount of points, consumers can exchange them for MAC products.

Building referral programs

Creating referral programs can boost word-of-mouth promotion and your positive reputation. By rewarding your existing customers for recommending your brand to their friends and family and encouraging them to make the first purchase, you can attract more customers. If clients recommend your business to others, it means that they like your products. This will positively affect your online reputation, recognition, and visibility.

Below, you can see how Hiver invites customers to refer their friends and get rewarded.

Tracking mentions and sentiment on social media

When you watch mentions and sentiments on social media, you can get a clear picture of what customers think of your brand. Based on the percentage of positive and negative comments, replies, and reviews, you’ll be able to discover opinions about your business. They will help you focus on the right direction and areas that need your urgent involvement. Remember, all these mentions influence your online reputation and can harm it when problems aren’t addressed in time. If you quickly identify and eliminate problems, you can boost satisfaction and enhance customer experience.

Below, you can see how Charlotte Tilbury Cosmetics’ agents reply to each comment under the brand’s posts.

Regularly publishing relevant content

Quality content is key to attracting new site visitors and establishing an online presence and visibility. By sharing helpful articles, blog posts, social media posts, infographics, reports, and other materials, you can showcase your expertise and the value of your product. This will help you promote your brand as a reliable company, generating more clients. Publishing content consistently according to the schedule allows you to rank higher in the top results on Google, making it more likely to be noticed.

Let’s take a look at SendPulse’s blog. The company consistently shares blog posts on relevant topics, ensuring site visitors get all the fresh information to improve their marketing strategy.

Tracking customer feedback on review platforms

If you want to understand what customers think about your product and find areas for improvement, you should monitor their reviews on various platforms. This will help you determine what clients appreciate about your product and what they don't like. With these insights, you can address problematic areas and enhance the customer experience. This will result in a better online reputation and more happy customers eager to stick with your brand.

Now that you have some effective strategies at hand, it‘s time to find out how you can bring them to life more effectively and efficiently. Let‘s explore 5 best tools to help you manage your online reputation.

Online reputation management can be difficult without using a special platform. We‘ll list 5 best tools in terms of pricing, features, and ease of use to consider. Let‘s dive in.

Hootsuite

The service‘s social listening feature allows you to track and analyze customer engagement and enhance your social media strategy. Its AI helps you understand conversations and summarize them into insightful reports. Quick search allows you to find brand mentions, trending topics, and various interactions quickly, while AI sentiment analysis enables you to determine how people feel about your brand, competitors, or a specific topic.

Below, you can see how to track customer sentiment on your social media using Hootsuite.

Pricing: The platform offers a 30-day free trial, but you’ll need to provide your payment details to access it. If you want to purchase a paid plan, the cheapest one costs $99 per user monthly for 10 social accounts, unlimited post scheduling, posting time recommendations, custom analytics and reports, an AI caption, hashtag, and idea generator, listening basics, and more.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another social media management solution that helps businesses boost their social media marketing efforts and receive data-driven insights for well-thought-out decisions. With the service, you can effectively engage with your audience, communicate your message, and build a reputation as a reliable and credible brand, encouraging trust and word-of-mouth promotion.

The platform has many features that are valuable for managing your online presence. The listening tool powered by AI is one of them. It allows you to understand feelings and opinions related to your product, topics, or competitors. Additionally, you can identify customer preferences and needs to develop even more targeted strategies. While using Sprout Social, you can assess customer behavior regarding your topics to determine how well specific trends work with your audience.

Below, you will find an example of competitive monitoring on Sprout Social, which you can understand how customers feel about your competitors.

Pricing: The service offers new users a 30-day free trial. Once you are sure that Sprout Social is suitable for your company, you will need to pay a minimum of $199 per seat monthly if billed annually. This plan covers five social profiles, keyword and location monitoring, unlimited AI-generated alt text, review management, and group, profile, and post-level management reporting.

Mention

Mention is a marketing tool that empowers you to make data-driven business decisions after analyzing the web, online conversations, and social media. The service helps you identify what people say about your brand, evaluate the influence of your press relations campaigns, conduct competitive analysis, seamlessly manage your social media, and run market research.

You can have a clear understanding of any topic, brand, or leading figure after the platform collects mentions from all the sources. Its profound analytics allows you to have a full picture of reach, volume, sentiment, location, source, and emotion related to your business. After that, you’ll be able to create engaging social media posts that resonate with your audience and respond to their needs.

Below, you can see how to use the platform to set up an alert that collects mentions based on your keywords.

Pricing: The tool offers a 14-day trial period for new users to test the features. After the trial expires, you’ll need to pay $41 monthly if billed annually for 2 alerts, 5,000 mentions, 1 user, and 1 account per social network.

ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers is a platform that analyzes customer feedback and reviews to improve customer loyalty and experience. It also helps you conduct competitive performance analysis, control crises, and monitor reviews to prevent problems from escalating.

The tool enables you to monitor reviews, helping you improve your customer experience and relationships with your audience. You can also reply to this feedback with AI-generated review responses. ReviewTrackers offers personalized Smart Response templates to use to your advantage to respond on autopilot. With its help, you can track and identify social mentions. Using the platform’s analytics and reports, you can make data-driven decisions about improving your visibility and online reputation.

Below, you can see the process of monitoring customer reviews using ReviewTrackers.

Pricing: The platform’s website doesn’t provide pricing for its plans, but you can always request a demo to learn more about the prices.

Brand24

Brand24 is a social listening platform that helps you drive success across multiple online channels and boost your brand visibility. It will provide you with access to mentions across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and even more sources. Advanced sentiment analysis will not only help you gather customer feedback but also segment it based on clients’ emotions, such as positive, negative, or neutral. When using the service, you can effectively assess your reach, brand awareness, and use statistics and insights for a better experience and higher customer satisfaction.

Brand24 allows you to monitor different hashtags and identify the right influencers. You can also evaluate how a hashtag campaign impacts your brand and understand the level of engagement. Additionally, its AI brand assistant will provide personalized recommendations, create customized alerts to track reviews in real time, and analyze customer sentiment.

Below, you will find how to check positive and negative brand mentions using Brand24.

Pricing: The service offers a 14-day free trial. After that, you can enjoy the benefits of a paid plan. The cheapest plan costs $119 monthly if paid annually, and it includes 2,000 mentions, one user, an update every 12 hours, and basic AI features.

Now that you have some useful tools in mind, it’s time to proceed to the tips for ensuring the success of your online reputation management strategy.

10 Effective Tips to Follow

Reputation is a very fragile concept, especially at a time when all the negative comments are visible and easily accessible on social networks. Since every negative review impacts your company, we’ll show you how to prevent it with ORM. We’ll unveil some tips to improve it.

1. Track social media networks. To have a perfect online reputation, having accounts on various social media platforms is not enough. For greater success of your brand, you need to monitor and update your social media profiles. Consider using special social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Agorapulse. Strive to regularly post on your social networks and increase your organic following. Share Stories, Reels, and posts to expand your reach and communicate with your prospects. Reply to comments on posts and encourage discussions to increase activity on your social media.
2. Let customers leave reviews on special platforms. Positive online reviews are powerful tools for influencing the decisions of potential customers. Most prospects search the internet to find out whether a product or brand receives positive reviews. They search product review websites and comments under your posts to find the necessary information. If your product has many positive reviews, it increases the likelihood of a person buying it. According to statistics, 95% of clients read online reviews before purchasing. Positive reviews increase trust in a brand, and more leads buy from businesses that have reviews from previous customers.
3. Write for your blog. Online reputation depends on all online platforms, including your blog. Blogging allows you to build authority in your industry and show your expertise. Share useful content with users to help solve their problems and encourage them to purchase your product. By publishing quality content, you can gain the trust of your audience, establish a strong online presence, and build a community around your brand.
4. Reply to negative customers’ comments. You need to be wise when answering comments under your social media posts or product reviews. There’s no place for criticism or discussions with customers. You need to be short and clear in your responses. Thank clients for their feedback and promise to resolve the issue (if it exists). When customers have some problems, solve them. Use this information to improve your product and prevent this situation from happening again. Treat your clients with respect and avoid any negative discussions and debates.
5. Avoid participating in debates. As a professional, you shouldn’t be affected by criticism or hate. Don’t engage in discussions with users under your posts or on discussion platforms. It can harm your online reputation. Always try to resolve the problem offline to provide real value to customers who experienced issues with your product.
6. Use special tools to manage social media engagement. Having practical tools at hand when managing social media is a must for building a successful online presence. Platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, or Social Bee allow you to monitor every interaction and sentiment related to your brand. With their help, you can effectively reply to comments and direct messages, contributing to your overall reputation and brand image.
7. Set up chatbots for your social media networks and messengers. By ensuring instant support 24/7, you gain appreciation from users. They are happy with your brand when you provide them with all the necessary information, let them make appointments, accept payments, and process returns in seconds. All these processes can be automated when you use a chatbot. You can add it to your website, social media, or messengers, depending on the channels your audience uses most often.
8. Answer common questions quickly on your website. Consider setting up a live chat for your website. It will help users get all the information and resources they need without any agent involvement, saving time for your potential customers and customer support representatives. You can develop a live chat that provides answers directly from your knowledge base, ensuring that replies are 100% accurate and relevant.
9. Host Q&A sessions. To engage with your target audience directly online, you can organize Q&A sessions with your experts. While gathering all the necessary information about your brand, potential customers will come to know your company better, along with your mission, values, and main purpose. The better people understand your business, the more they will trust your company and want to support it.
10. Join forums and communities. These are the perfect places to promote your company online and establish an online presence. When users discuss a problem and your product can help resolve it, share it with a wide audience. Some may ignore your messages, but others might be interested in exploring them. You can also encourage more action by offering exclusive discounts and attractive offers for first-time customers.

Overall, online reputation management is crucial nowadays because many young people use Google to search for solutions to their problems. They can also explore social media, where it’s easier to get the right information. That’s why, to stay competitive and visible to your customers, you should allocate enough resources to this business area. Special tools will help you effectively track and analyze interactions with your brand and take the right steps toward improving your online reputation.

Last Updated: 09.01.2025