What is one of the first things you do when you want to purchase a product, book a hotel or something of that sorts? Let me guess. You check online reviews. I don’t remember the last time I bought something (especially online) without checking the reviews. Customers are constantly searching for information about a product or a service online, and most of the times their decisions, whether to buy something or not, depends on the reviews that they find. It doesn’t really matter if there are bad reviews about your product, employees or brand in general. If potential customers see a lot of them, they probably won’t be as excited to make a purchase like they were in the beginning.

Building your reputation is a hard and long process. The scary thing is that it can go away in a matter of seconds. These days everything happens fast and you need to keep up the pace. No matter how good your products or services are, you as a brand need to be aware that once in a while something will (probably) go wrong and people will write negative reviews. Your job is to detect those negative reviews and try to solve the problem in a way that will benefit you and your customers in the long run.

Reviews – where to look for them?

As we all know, customers won’t write their reviews only on your Facebook page or website. They’ll probably use their personal social media accounts and express their opinions there. Despite that, it’s not really a good idea to turn off the option for customers to write reviews on your pages because that can also negatively impact their buying decisions. When people use their personal accounts they’ll sometimes tag you and you’ll know about the review right away. But sometimes they won’t do that and then you may have a problem that you are not even aware of.

Here’s where media monitoring comes in handy. With media monitoring, you can track mentions of your brand and easily detect what types of issues people have with your brand. There will be positive reviews as well, and you should respond to them too.  It doesn’t matter what type of sentiment the review has, it is a perfect opportunity to establish communication with your customer and build a stronger relationship in the long run.

Below, you can see the example of a review in which the company wasn’t tagged. If you’re manually searching for mentions like this, you’re wasting your time, money and human resources. With media monitoring, you can detect reviews like this in a matter of seconds. Detecting negative reviews early on will provide you with enough time for a well-thought response. In your response to the unsatisfied customer, you should firstly apologize for the inconvenience, ask the customer to provide you with some details, and maybe offer some kind of compensation. These types of reviews tend to go viral if other people had the exact bad experience with your product or service so you shouldn’t just ignore them because they can become a problem.

Traveling on Etihad airlines.. Flight overbooked.. Ground staff have no answers.. Sample of over advertising a bad product

— Khaled Basha (@khbasha) April 6, 2019

How to know right away?

Another great thing about media monitoring is spike alerts. If the number of mentions starts growing unexpectedly, you’ll get notified. That will allow you to act quickly and productively. Also, you just might stop the potential crisis in the making. Here’s the example of a spike alert that you can get on your e-mail. They’re also available on Slack and in the app.

Keep your eyes on the sentiment

With sentiment analysis, you’ll be able to see whether your customers mention you in a negative or positive context. If your positive-negative sentiment ratio looks like a picture below, you’re probably doing something wrong. You should reevaluate your business strategies and engage with your customers to get the situation back on track. Sentiment analysis will allow you to track whether you’re making progress over time, moving backward or staying in the status quo.

With media monitoring, you can find influencers that are mentioning your brand a lot. This way you can get in touch with them and ask them for collaboration or opinion on how to make your product or service better. Even if they didn’t like what you offer, same as customers, they’ll appreciate you wanting to improve your brand with their opinions. In the long run, maybe they’ll become your customers as well. Here’s the example of how the list of influencers looks in the tool.

You should be open to criticism as much as you’re open to praise. Sometimes you’ll find that customers reviews can contain constructive advice that you can actually implement and make your product or service better. Keep an eye on the reviews and make the best of your situation.

If you want to try media monitoring, sign up for a 14-day trial.

FREE TRIAL