Using Hootsuite to Manage Social Media and Improve Your Brand Reputation

Social media can play a crucial role in your organization’s ability to manage and deliver more meaningful and integrated customer experiences. Social media facilitates real-time interaction, serves as a valuable source of customer feedback and insights, shapes your brand reputation and visibility, and can even function as a platform for market research.

With Hootsuite, the social media management platform for the enterprise, and Pearl-Plaza, the leader in improving experiences and the highest recommended CX platform and services company in the world, your company can integrate customer experience data from social media sources to uncover the insights that enable the smartest actions.

What is Hootsuite?

Hootsuite is one of today’s most widely used social media management platforms. It helps the world’s top brands and enterprise organizations manage their social media efforts in one place. 

Founded in 2008, Hootsuite supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. Hootsuite also enables access to valuable insights, analytics, and real-time results to help teams understand and improve their social media performance. The platform also has a growing App Directory that lets companies connect existing marketing, content, and other business systems to Hootsuite.

With Hootsuite, organizations can enhance the effectiveness of their social media management efforts, build a stronger brand reputation, and gain valuable insights into the customer experience.  

The Impact of Social Media on Brand Reputation

Social media can significantly impact brand reputation, influencing how a brand is perceived by existing and potential customers. Your brand presence on social media can be either positive or negative, and this largely depends on how your team manages social media and engages with your audience on social platforms.

Brands that actively manage their social media presence, engage with their audience, respond to online reviews and customer feedback, and demonstrate authenticity are better positioned to maintain a positive reputation. 

• Outside of online review websites (like Yelp, Google, and Tripadvisor), consumers turn to social media platforms to learn more about businesses. 46% of consumers turn to Facebook, 35% to YouTube, 32% to Instagram, and 20% to TikTok.
• Answering a complaint on social media can increase customer advocacy by 25%.

Positive social media interactions can turn customers into brand advocates. When satisfied customers share their positive experiences, it contributes to building a strong and positive brand reputation. Encouraging and recognizing brand advocates can further strengthen your brand’s image.

Hootsuite Features to Manage Your Brand Reputation

Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media management platform with a range of features designed to help users manage, schedule, and analyze their social media activities. Below are some features your team can use to manage your company’s social presence and brand reputation management.

Social Media Publishing

Hootsuite’s social media publishing features allow teams to create and publish content across multiple social media networks in one place. The platform tells you when to post on social media to get the highest engagement; there is also an option for using the bulk social media scheduler. 

Streamlined approvals also reduce risk and ensure that all your posts are ready to go thanks to a simple approval process that allows team members to review. Meanwhile, if your team is looking for creative inspiration for posts, Hootsuite has built a new AI tool that can instantly generate captions and new post ideas.

Brand Monitoring and Social Media Listening

If potential and existing customers wish to engage with your brand, they aren’t always going to visit your website, send you an email, give you a phone call, or fill out a survey form. Thanks to social media, they now have the option of tagging your brand on Twitter or Instagram, posting Facebook reviews, or sharing their feedback on other digital channels like Google, Tripadvisor, and Yelp.

Hootsuite’s social listening tools help your team avoid delays in responding to customers, regardless of where they choose to engage with your business. Out of the box, the platform lets your team add multiple user accounts so that you can see your brand’s entire social media presence in one place. Specifically, you can create different feeds or “streams” for each account. This allows your social media team to easily keep an eye on (and respond to) different types of user-generated content being published on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter from a single page.

Social Media Analytics and Hootsuite Insights

Hootsuite users can also access insights, analytics, and real-time results to help them understand and improve their social media performance. This lets your team cut out the guesswork with social media analytics tools that tell you exactly how to grow your brand on social. With Hootsuite, you can track essential metrics like follower growth, post effectiveness, and engagement metrics; you can also generate customizable reports to assess the impact of your social media strategy.

Employee Advocacy

Amplify is a feature of Hootsuite designed to facilitate employee advocacy on social media. Employee advocacy involves employees sharing company content and messages on their personal social media profiles to help amplify the brand’s reach and engagement.

With Amplify, Hootsuite lets team members share pre-approved content, such as company news, blog posts, promotions, and other relevant updates, directly from the Hootsuite platform to their social media profiles.

Show Off Reviews

With Hootsuite’s social publishing features, teams can show off great feedback and share the best reviews with their social media followers. These types of posts offer valuable social proof to prospects and can serve to guide their purchase decisions. 

Hootsuite Reputation Management: Keys to Success

Reputation management starts with comprehensive monitoring, and Hootsuite offers a solution to meet those needs. Here are some of the ways you can use Hootsuite to stay on top of the latest social conversations, feedback, and reviews about your brand.

Track Mentions and Conversations

Creating the right streams is incredibly useful especially when it comes to mentions. People are talking about your brand, and a dedicated mention stream allows you to quickly monitor these posts and engage when necessary. 

Often, people use social media to get customer service, and this provides another opportunity for your team to meet the demands of your customers and make them happy. According to research, 59% of consumers have a more favorable view of brands that respond to customer service questions or complaints on social media.

You can also use Hootsuite to track more specific elements, such as keywords, hashtags, and location data. This type of monitoring is helpful for any company that wants to keep tabs on its reputation on social media even when the conversation isn’t necessarily directed toward them in posts. The Voice of the Customer is especially loud on social media, and these insights help you find ways to improve customer service and experience for future patrons.

Respond to Reviews 

Responding to reviews is extremely important, especially for companies that are looking to convert prospects, casual visitors, and review readers into loyal customers. Taking part in the conversation and demonstrating that your brand cares about reviews and unsolicited feedback can have a significant impact on your company’s reputation and bottom-line performance.

Apart from monitoring social media content, teams can use Hootsuite streams to quickly respond to online reviews. Using the Hootsuite-ReviewTrackers integration, users can post review responses through Hootsuite, helping build brand trust and demonstrating that your company cares about customer feedback. 

Interpret Data and Act on Insights

Gaining customer insights from social media is crucial for several reasons, as it provides your organization with valuable insights that can inform strategic decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance overall performance.

You can use Hootsuite to capture valuable customer feedback and actionable insights into the customer experience. Given the capabilities of Hootsuite’s social media analytics and reporting tools, you can learn what customers want, fix specific pain points that are impacting the customer experience,  analyze and interpret social conversations at scale, and spot opportunities to improve your brand reputation.

Frequently Asked Questions about Using Hootsuite

Let’s dive deeper into Hootsuite’s capabilities as a social media management platform. Here are responses to the most frequently asked questions about using Hootsuite.

What is the Most Popular Feature of Hootsuite?

Apart from its comprehensive social listening capabilities, Hootsuite is also known for its social media content management tools. Users can organize and manage their content efficiently, including creating and editing posts, saving drafts, distributing pre-approved content to employees, and collaborating with other team members within your organization.

What Does the Reports Feature Do in Hootsuite Analytics? 

Getting insightful reports is quick and easy with Hootsuite Analytics. The Reports feature in Hootsuite Analytics offers fully customizable collections of social media analytics data. Each Report has a flexible, interactive interface that tailors it to include the exact metrics you want, letting you drag and drop an unlimited number of “tiles,” which are individual displays of a specific metric. 

The number of Reports you can create within Hootsuite Analytics is unlimited. Apart from analyzing metrics on specific platforms like Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, Hootsuite also offers paid ad analytics as well as integrations with Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, ensuring all your social and web data is in one place.  so all your social and web data is in one place.

What Apps Integrate with Hootsuite?

Hootsuite offers a wide range of integrations with various apps and services. These integrations enhance the functionality of Hootsuite and allow users to manage their social media activities more efficiently. For example, you can link your social networks, track Google reviews, create visual content designed in Canva, and integrate your CRM data right into your Hootsuite dashboard.

Pearl-Plaza also integrates with Hootsuite to enable the monitoring of social media data and reviews in one central place. With Pearl-Plaza’s Hootsuite app integration, you can view online reviews in a Hootsuite stream — with filtering options for organizing and managing customer feedback — alongside social media comments and signals. As part of its review management feature set, the integration also allows you to quickly share your best reviews across your social media pages and profiles, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google.

Supercharge Your Social + Reviews + Reputation with Pearl-Plaza and Hootsuite

Social data and reviews can be harnessed to help your company discover and interpret key insights into the customer experience. By leveraging Hootsuite and its integration with Pearl-Plaza’s reputation management software, you can cultivate a healthy brand reputation and act upon social signals to drive improvements in products, services, customer experiences, and overall business success.

References 

EveryoneSocial. “The 20 Social Listening Statistics Your Company Must Know” (https://everyonesocial.com/blog/social-listening-statistics/). Access 12/22/2023.

Status Labs. “52 Online Reputation Statistics for 2023” (https://statuslabs.com/blog/reputation-management-stats). Access 12/22/2023.