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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
Remember when social media management meant juggling countless browser tabs while drowning in spreadsheets? If that's still your reality, there's a better way. Social media AI agents are changing how marketing managers approach their brands' digital presence — and I'm...
Jul 1, 2025
Marketers routinely face challenges like negative comments spreading quickly, PR crises unfolding in real time, and the uphill battle of maintaining brand trust online. Protecting a brand’s image online has become just as important as creating great campaigns. With the right social media management tools for agencies and clear strategies in place, teams can track conversations, respond effectively, and shape a positive brand image before small issues turn into big problems.
Here’s how you get started with social media reputation management. Below you’ll find tips, best practices, and examples of companies that strengthened their brand by staying proactive and engaged.
Social media reputation management involves strategically monitoring and guiding conversations about a brand across all its social media pages. It cultivates trust through personalized communication. You respond promptly to comments, reviews, and messages, according to a unified vision, but also use social listening tools to incorporate customer feedback into your social media strategy.
Your brand’s reputation can directly affect customer trust, sales, and even employee morale. Here’s why it’s non-negotiable:
People look at reviews, comments, and how brands respond before making a purchase.
One negative tweet can go viral before your lunch break is over.
Brands with strong reputations tend to grow faster and bounce back quicker from PR mishaps.
According to Zendesk, over half of consumers will switch to a competitor after only one bad experience. An unanswered negative review counts, so reputation management strategies with a savvy approach to negative feedback will stand out.
Online reputation management works best as prevention, with a strategic vision already in place. As long as there’s flexibility for incorporating customer feedback and insights from continuous sentiment analysis, a social media reputation team can move swiftly and efficiently. Here’s how:
Waiting until a crisis hits isn’t enough — proactive monitoring is key. Social media reputation management is not supposed to be reactive, but a long-term vision that plans ahead for the most likely outcomes. In this scenario, reactions to negative reviews, for example, are just one tool in your strategic toolbox.
To effectively get a grasp of a brand’s online reputation, you should:
Many reputation management tools can monitor brand mentions, but Planable is the friendliest one around and does so much more. It keeps your team aligned with real-time engagement tracking and comment aggregation, but also handles all your written content, on and off social media platforms.
Plan and repurpose content across blog posts, emails, and all major social media platforms.
The only thing worse than unexpected negative feedback threatening your brand’s reputation? All that, plus not being able to reach the people with decision-making power. And when you do get together, there’s contradictory feedback on how to talk to your target audience.
You can avoid this scenario by:
The Ryanair social media people are no strangers to crises of all sizes unfolding on their socials. But they’re so consistently funny with both posts and replies. You’ll often find their comment sections split between customer service mishaps and people praising their humor.
Effective reputation management only works if tasks are assigned long before a crisis hits. Make sure everyone knows who handles what type of feedback (product complaints, support questions, legal issues).
Assign team leads for various scenarios to keep responses quick and on-message, but also to make sure that someone monitors how an approach is implemented across social media platforms.
Building a crisis management plan with a sturdy template library is easier if you create a clear approval process for each scenario.
Planable unifies feedback for each piece of content involved in reputation management, has the option of keeping specific comments or posts internal, and lets you set custom approval workflows.
Take this first comment on a post by makeup brand Merit. The request likely went from one person on the social media team (community manager) to another (content planner or content creator). If it had been a legal, delivery, or new product request, it would have been assigned to someone else. Having this list mapped out cuts response times by a lot.
Consistency builds trust. It’s crucial to have tone guidelines and response templates that reflect your brand values, especially during tense situations. They also need to allow for enough personalization and flair from the social media person implementing them. Customer satisfaction hinges on personalized responses.
To stay on-brand and build a positive reputation:
Consider the comments on this giveaway post from Betty Buzz, a non-alcoholic cocktail brand. The replies are very simple, but they carry that fizzy, bubbly quality the brand embodies so well. They literally have bubbles in the product, but their down-to-earth enthusiasm also shines through in every tone choice (including the fact that they don’t shy away from all caps).
User-generated content like positive reviews, whether on your social media channels or third-party review sites, strengthens your online reputation like nothing else. You should respond promptly to positive comments, too, but the key is in what happens after. Use social proof to build brand visibility.
Repost user-generated content, thank your fans, don’t let a happy comment pass without acknowledging it. The more you uplift these interactions, the better you build a strong, vocal community.
To really make the most of social listening, pencil in time to brainstorm fresh uses for online reviews and photos of your product in the wild. Whole campaigns can be built on good Google reviews.
I enjoyed this next-level example of how to react to positive feedback. A book cover designer (Elisha Zepeda) responds to praise from an author (Melissa Albert) by complimenting the author’s own book series and cover design. Get to know the voices in your niche well enough to do this!
In the long run, a positive online presence is sustained by meticulous media monitoring. Track patterns in feedback, spikes in sentiment, and high-risk topics. Notice how world events influence online conversations in your industry and what major players express opinions that can be relevant to your brand image.
Use analytics to improve your messaging and inform strategy. Positive reviews and trust built from well-handled customer concerns will act as a buffer in case of risk. Monitor the way newly implemented templates influence customer sentiment. Insights from thorough media monitoring can reveal anything from an escalating crisis to a whole untapped audience segment.
Grillo’s Pickles have an excellent radar for trends that fit their brand. They naturally walk into the ever-evolving conversation about unsettling snacks and lean into the quirkiness of the pickle itself. I still don’t know if I’d try this soft serve, but they do have my attention.
Planable is a great social media reputation management tool built especially for the collaborative nature of this job. Its Engagement feature can centralize brand mentions and input from multiple team members, which is especially useful for negative feedback.
To help you stay on top of every interaction and maintain a positive brand image, Planable includes features that allow you to:
Use these features in tandem with Planable’s content workflow tools to keep messaging and reputation aligned.
Everything happens in the same place where you plan, create, approve, and monitor content. A unified calendar organizes all your posts for 9 of the biggest social media platforms, and your team can leave comments and suggestions on each one.
This makes implementing feedback 5x faster (an essential element for building a positive online reputation).
Manage and respond to social media conversations from one unified engagement hub.
Approvals are multi-layered for each workspace (none, optional, mandatory, multi-level), which is especially useful for responses to intense customer feedback or sensitive updates that have to go out today.
Customize your approval process with optional, required, or multi-level workflows.
You’ve also got the option of setting custom roles and permissions for each person and sharing links with external collaborators to keep workflows clean, clear, and bottleneck-free.
These 3 brands handle online reputation management in a way I find downright inspiring. You can see their customer sentiment metrics are good without having access to their analytics; it shines through when you comb through their social media accounts.
Poppi is a soda brand that does social media reputation management with a lot of verve. The grid? Instantly recognizable. Every comment section? Brimming with enthusiasm for new flavors. All the goodwill built through a mix of savvy collaborations and meme-style content is very visible.
Beyond the flashy campaigns, they cultivated trust through supportive replies to comments. Asking for merch colors is a simple way to gather data, but also encourages some lively contributions from longtime fans.
Nurturing a positive online image includes having a protocol in place for your collaborations with influencers. Exposure to different audiences can make for intense comment sections, but find the right collaborators, and your overall brand image will get a real boost.
Take this collab between furniture brand West Elm and Shavonda Gardner, a famed designer and influencer. You can see genuine enthusiasm for the new collection all throughout the comments, while the way she replies is both natural to her and geared towards brand loyalty.
Okay, it’s true. Not all brands shaping their online reputation started out as local businesses with a cult following 4 decades ago. But if your organization has existed since before the internet, using digital channels as branded archives is crucial for your company’s reputation.
Ouidad is a haircare brand named after its founder, Ouidad Wise, who opened a salon catering exclusively to curly hair back in 1984. The brand regularly celebrates this heritage via social media posts, and dedicated followers never fail to appear. Their contributions are consistently acknowledged.
When you incorporate reputation management strategies into your social media efforts, the whole team can move as one. Templates ease customer interactions, and you’ll start seeing results when doing sentiment analysis. Some healthy habits to establish:
Brand sentiment moves so quickly that social media reputation management isn’t optional — it’s essential.
By staying consistent, listening closely, and using tools like Planable to collaborate better, you can build a brand people trust. Start your free Planable trial today and get 50 free posts to test it out.
Irina is a freelance conceptual copywriter with an ethical edge and an advertising agency background. If she’s not rummaging for good synonyms, she’s probably watching a sitcom or listening to radio dramas with plucky amateur detectives. She loves collage, doing crosswords on paper and shazamming the birds outside her window.
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