SOCi Launches Reputation Insights for Sentiment & Competitive Monitoring

SOCi, a provider of social media and reputation management for multi-location brands, announced the launch of SOCi Reputation Insights. Comprised of sentiment and competitive monitoring, SOCi Reputation Insights is designed to help multi-location marketers identify and manage emerging sentiment and competitive trends from online reviews and analyze shifts in online reputation over time.

Reviews are now the primary factor for consumers when deciding whether or not to do business with a brand and a top ranking factor in local search results. More than 70% of customers read reviews every time/almost every time they research a purchase decision, and one in two consumers have passed up a business for having less than a four-star rating. As a result, it is now more important than ever for brands to manage their local reputation and proactively build a positive online reputation while knowing where they stand in relation to competitors.

Created with multi-location brands in mind, SOCi Reputation Insights highlights keywords and specific aspects of the business that are used in a positive, negative, or neutral manner in a given timeframe. These insights can then be further analyzed against local and national competitors, helping marketers quickly identify areas of differentiation. Using Google's Natural Language Processing to analyze word sentiment within the context of a sentence, brands can identify the root cause of consumer dissatisfaction and address issues immediately or, even better, before a bad review is posted.

SOCi Reputation Insights offers a number of valuable new features to help multi-location brands better manage their online reputation, including the ability to filter review sentiment data by date, network, rating, and market. The word cloud feature helps marketers visualize keywords and analyze specific topics to gain deeper insight. Additionally, the share of voice feature allows users to drill down and compare their performance on top keywords against their competitors’ locations. Further, local social marketers can leverage reputation competition insights to identify areas for opportunity in their market and see trends across similar businesses. Competitive monitoring allows users to analyze reviews, average review scores, and average response time for up to four local competitors. With reputation sentiment and competition features, SOCi Reputation Insights helps local social managers be reactive and proactive in managing their online reputation.

SOCi research found that 77% of consumers expect a business to respond to their feedback, and more than 40% want this feedback within 24 hours. With a proactive and timely review management process, businesses have the potential to turn negative reviews and experiences into positive ones. Almost 90% of consumers would be willing to change a negative review depending on the business’ response to their criticism.

SOCi Reputation Insights is available immediately — at no additional cost — for all customers who are leveraging reputation management within the SOCi platform. For more information on how to uncover deeper insight from online reviews and proactively manage your localized social marketing efforts overall, please visit this link.