Social Media Reputation: Strategy, Definition and Tips [Guide for 2024]

In December 2023, the global gaming community was thrilled with a trailer for one of the most anticipated games ever: GTA VI. The developer, Rockstar Games, was on everyone’s lips. But the company wasted the whole hype. A series of wrong decisions and poor communication resulted in a rise of mistrust and a massive drop in their social media reputation. In just 6 months, Rockstar Games’ Reputation Score fell from a stable -8 to an alarming -48!

Social media reputation is the overall perception and sentiment of a brand, person, or company expressed through social media channels. It is shaped by both your activity on social platforms and others’ comments & reviews.

A good social media reputation builds trust and supports your growth. On the other side, a bad reputation can harm your brand image.

Table of contents:

• What is social media reputation? Definition
• How can you quickly check your social media reputation?
• Why is social media reputation important?
• Social media reputation strategy:
  • Step 1: Examine your current reputation
  • Step 2: Build a positive social media reputation
  • Step 3: Monitor your reputation
  • Step 4: Constantly improve reputation
• Conclusion

What is social media reputation? Definition

Social media reputation is what people think and feel about you or your brand based on what they see on social media platforms.

It is built through YOUR social media activity, such as posts you publish or interactions, and OTHERS’ social media activity, such as comments under your posts or reviews of your products shared on social media pages.

All these elements shape public perception of you and influence your success or failure.

How can you quickly check your social media reputation?

The fastest way to check your current online reputation is by looking at an indicator called Reputation Score.

It’s like a quick overview of your general brand reception on the web.

In short, the Reputation Score represents a numerical value for credibility and trust in your brand. It ranges from -100 (extremely bad) to 100 (extremely good).

The score is based on your total reach of mentions and the sentiment analysis. The better these values are, the higher your Reputation Score is.

As for measuring the Reputation Score, it is possible to do so with some social media monitoring tools, including Brand24.

Why is social media reputation important?

The shortest answer is: a good social media reputation can increase your trust and likeability, while a bad reputation can hurt your public image and make people avoid you.

In practice, a positive online reputation in social media channels can attract more followers, leads, customers, and social media engagement to you and your brand.

Some hard numbers to prove it’s true:

• According to DataReportal, 75% of people use social media to research products;
  
  
• Many people look for information and reviews about businesses on social media. According to BrightLocal, the top social media platforms for that purpose are Facebook (46%), YouTube (35%), Instagram (32%), and TikTok (20%).
  
  
• Negative social media reputation can also impact individuals! For example, as many as 80% of employers have rejected a candidate based on what they found about them on their social media accounts.
  
  
• As TrustPulse informs, reviews shared on Twitter increase sales by an average of 6.46% for eCommerce stores.

Besides sales, the quality of your social media presence can impact the likelihood of a brand crisis and the market value of your brand:

• Business Insider discovered that it takes around 12 positive interactions to recover from just one negative feedback. So, if you’re not careful enough, even a single negative social media post can snowball into a brand crisis;
  
  
• Multiple sources (including the European Union’s official report) underline that social media and online reputation directly impact stock prices.

Social media reputation strategy

Okay, now you know what social media reputation is and why it’s so important.

That’s a good foundation for the next step: building your data-driven social media reputation management strategy.

Step 1: Examine your current reputation

Each process of implementing improvements must start with measuring the current state of your social media reputation.

I think it’s a no-brainer.

All in all, you must have a reference point to know if your future actions improve or harm your online reputation, right?

Honestly, discovering your actual reputation without online tools is freaking difficult and time-consuming.

Your time is the most valuable resource you have.

And that’s why you should head towards AI social listening tools.

They provide practical reputation management data in the blink of an eye, such as who talks about you and what emotions are most frequently expressed when people discuss your brand.

Check your Reputation Score

As I told you before, checking the Reputation Score is the quickest way to know the big picture regarding your online reputation.

Now, I will show you HOW to check your Reputation Score in practice using Brand24.

Brand24 is AI social listening software that detects, tracks, and analyzes online mentions from multiple sources.

An online mention could be literally any keyword you define, such as a brand name, a hashtag, your nickname, your product’s unique specification, etc.

The tool focuses both on the quantity of those mentions and on their quality, thanks to advanced sentiment analysis features.

Brand24 is exceptionally great due to the number of sources it monitors:

• Social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Telegram, and Twitch);
• Video sites, podcasts, news sites, blogs & other websites;
• Online reviews platforms & newsletters

In practice, all you need to do to check your brand’s Reputation Score is visit the “Analysis Tab”.

Yes, it’s THAT simple!

Let me show you a real-life example.

I love video games. I could play Red Dead Redemption and GTA over and over again. If you’ve ever had a chance to play these titles, you know exactly what I mean.

Both of these masterpieces are created by the same studio – Rockstar Games.

So, I decided to create a project in Brand24 to check the company’s reputation. What’s the wrap-up?

It’s really terrible! And it’s getting even worse over time!

Whoops!

Measuring Reputation Score gives you:

• A quick overview of your actual brand’s online reputation;
• Benchmark on how your efforts have been impacting your overall brand recognition;
• The competitive edge of your brand performance.

Conduct the sentiment analysis of your brand

Once you know your Reputation Score, you can go into more detail about your social media reputation.

So, let’s take one step further and discuss the sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis lets you understand the basis of your social media reputation – the people’s feelings towards your brand.

Generally speaking, there are three types of sentiment – positive, negative, and neutral.

Some tools (like Brand24) offer AI sentiment analysis. It uses the power of artificial intelligence to identify emotional words in each mention and classify them.

For example, if my friend publishes a tweet: “Red Dead Redemption is the best game in the Universe!”, the social listening tool rates it as “positive”.

On the other hand, if I write a Facebook post stating that “GTA V is a piece of garbage”, the tool would perceive it as negative feedback.

Moreover, the sentiment analysis can identify which social media channels generate the most positive and negative sentiments.

To find this information, just open Brand24’s AI Metrics Analysis.

Among the six charts you’ll see there, find the one showing your top source for negative mentions.

In Rockstar Games’ case, the undisputed negativity champion is X (Twitter).

The conclusion?

Rockstar Games should invest more resources in the brand’s social media reputation on this platform.

Okay, but is there any quick way to discover what directly impacts your social media reputation?

Yup! It’s called the AI Anomaly Detector.

In short, the Anomaly Detector constantly watches your monitored project (i.e., Rockstar Games) and identifies any unusual behavior.

Imagine such a situation.

You usually get 100 – 200 mentions daily. Suddenly, you got mentioned over 1000 times in just one day. That’s a sign that something significant happened. And this critical thing will surely impact your reputation.

And now, the AI Anomaly Detector enters the stage.

It searches through your project and the web to discover what caused the sudden spike in mentions volume. Once the analysis is done, the Anomaly Detector presents it in one or two essential sentences.

That’s super important because if an unexpected negative event has the potential to escalate, it can begin a reputation crisis.

Tracking sentiment analysis gives you:

• More detailed insights into how your audience feels about your brand;
• Understanding of which key events impacted your social media reputation;
• Knowledge about which social media platforms you should focus on to improve your reputation.

Discover emotions around your brand

As I told you before, most social listening tools identify three basic types of sentiment – positive, neutral, and negative.

However, the more accurate your emotion analysis, the better you can adjust your social media marketing and communication strategy.

Brand24 goes into more detail. In addition to the basic sentiment analysis, it identifies six specific feelings behind mentions: disgust, admiration, joy, sadness, anger, and fear.

Such a detailed analysis is possible thanks to the advanced AI models used by Brand24.

Discover whether influencers talk about your brand in a positive or negative way

Let’s put it clear – not every voice on social media has equal meaning. People with more social media followers usually have more influence on your digital reputation.

Therefore, you should know who are the most influential authors publishing content in favor of your brand image. And who shares the most hate.

Discovering that is simple. Just visit Brand24’s Influencer Analysis and check the charts of your positive & negative influencers.

Step 2: Build a positive social media reputation

Online reputation management is not passive. If you want to build a positive brand reputation, you must be proactive and implement improvements to your social media strategy.

As you already know your existing social media reputation, it’s time to take step two and work on it!

These two things will surely help you:

• Stand out from a crowd

Social channels are full of accounts that are struggling for people’s limited attention. It’s a very competitive environment.

To make people read your social media posts or familiarize them with any type of content you share, you must capture their attention.

You must differentiate yourself from others. Make people recognize and remember you.

Improving your brand awareness and reputation requires creating a consistent set of unique brand identity elements, including a logo, color schemes, tone of voice, brand values, and communication style.

• Create high-quality content

Content is a king. And high-quality content is even an emperor.

It builds your niche expertise and credibility, making people trust your recommendations and opinions.

Think of the content as a product or service. Good content gets positive reviews, which improves your overall social media reputation.

Moreover, good content tends to spread like a virus! In other words, people are more keen on sharing your posts, stories, reels, or videos if they agree with you or believe in your topic authority.

It’s like a snowball effect. You create great content, which increases your engagement and brings you more followers, who then share your content further.

Step 3: Monitor your reputation 

Now that we have examined the current state and presented techniques for building a strong social media reputation, let’s move on to the next important step: social media monitoring.

It’s nothing more than checking your social media performance over time and its impact on your reputation.

Here, we will use the social media data from the first step, when we checked your actual reputation. Reference point, remember?

Again, the best way to monitor your social media reputation is using a tool like Brand24.

It offers a dashboard called Comparison, where you can benchmark your actual social media presence and reputation against the past.

This allows you to discover whether your reputation-building efforts have been successful.

As for Rockstar Games, I decided to check their performance by quarter.

Between the end of March and the end of June, the number of social media mentions increased by 33% compared to the previous three months. That’s good!

The social media reach was nearly doubled (from 175 million to 345 million). That’s even better!

Unfortunately, the percentage of positive impressions stayed constant, while negative comments rose by 6%.

Step 4: Constantly improve reputation

Last but not least, you must do continuous work to take care of your reputation and improve it!

How? Start with these two simple things:

• Engage with your audience

Your followers and existing customers constantly share their feedback about you and your brand. Their words simply can’t go into a vacuum.

Engagement is one of the most critical elements for managing social media reputation and overall social media success. Honestly, it’s often a “to be or not to be” moment for a brand.

You must be active. Listen to online conversations and customer feedback. Share your happiness with positive comments and reply to concerns stated in negative reviews. Otherwise – you lose the game.

You should do as much as you can to engage your audience. This is not only a matter of your online reputation but also of your brand visibility.

Because it’s not a secret knowledge that social media algorithms promote social media accounts that keep their followers engaged.

• Be authentic and transparent

In the world of social media, being real is key. Your audience can easily spot dishonesty.

Always act respecting your brand values and communicate openly with your followers. Transparency builds trust and credibility.

Share behind-the-scenes looks, admit mistakes you make, and show the human side of your brand.

This approach not only strengthens your reputation but also maintains a deeper connection with your audience.

Remember, in the end, honesty and authenticity resonate more powerfully than pretending to be perfect.

Conclusion

Social media reputation is crucial for any brand in today’s digital age, directly impacting public perception and success. 

A good social media reputation builds trust and supports growth, while a bad one can severely damage a brand’s image. 

Managing this reputation involves taking multiple actions, such as brand monitoring, responding to feedback, and consistently creating high-quality content.

In practice, using social listening tools like Brand24 streamlines the processes of tracking and improving brand reputation by analyzing mentions and sentiments. 

Final thoughts: 

• Multiple reports and studies agree that a positive online reputation is crucial for brands to stay healthy and survive in a highly competitive digital market;
  
  
• The more detailed insights into your audience’s feelings you have, the more accurate communication decisions you make;
  
  
• AI-powered social listening tools like Brand24 are irreplaceable for effective social media reputation management;
  
  
• Monitoring your reputation in real time lets you check if your efforts bring positive or negative results.

And you? Do you know your social media reputation? Still waiting? 

So, sign up for a free Brand24 trial and check by yourself how helpful it is!