How to Handle Negative Brand Mentions Effectively

Brand mentions are the most recent buzz in digital marketing. Any business small or big receives brand mentions each day. Brand mentions can be positive, negative or neutral. Brand mentions are considered important to SEO and also a factor that redefines measuring of brand authority by Google.

Negative Brand Mentions

Today about 88% of consumers analyze customer reviews, recommendations, and comments before purchasing any product. Hence your business can be hampered due to negative mentions. Business reputation is also affected from an SEO perspective in search results. The key factor that determines search engine rankings are backlinks. More value is provided to links that offer positive and neutral links and undervalues negative mentioned links. Here are a few points that help handle negative brand mentions.

How to Deal With Negative Brand Mentions?

1. Monitor your brand:

Social media monitoring and brand mentioning are mandatory when compared with any digital marketing campaign. Brand monitoring is essential for understanding authentic and valuable information. When brand mentions are tracked there are more chances to improve overall communication and product strategies.

2. Filter the mentions:

When a brand is online, data regarding the mentions of the brand is received. The negative brand mentions are to be spotted and filtered out. Filters are very helpful as they help in analyzing the required mentions.

3. Get to negative brand mentions:

It’s time to manage the feature where sentiment analysis feature is to be used. The mentions are first segmented to deal with them. The negative mentions are first checked one by one. By understanding the negative mentions, the source they occurred from, and when it was published gives a solution for half of the issue.

4. Know the complainer:

The complainer putting forth a negative mention can be anyone such as your customer, business partner, brand ambassador, or user. Once the complainer and complaints are known, it is great to gain insights, problem-solving technics, improvements, and knowledge. If tracking the complainer is tough, relax as there are apps such as brand mentions that help in identifying negative brands.

5. Contacting the complainer:

Once the complaint identified, the complainer can be contacted directly. The choices of contacting vary email or social media. In this case, the winning strategy is by contacting the complainer. By this way, there is an in-depth analysis of the issue. Also, the issue can be avoided in the future. The complainer is initially pleased once contacted and understands that the business cares for him or her. There are more chances for the customer to change their attitude after being contacted.

6. Quick reply:

It is important to act immediately on negative mentions as it averts the issue from growing bigger. It also avoids further complaints and negative mentions. This can be accomplished by utilizing alerts in emails. By activating alerts email notifications can be received at times of brand mentions. For speedy reply, tools such as brand mention can be installed. This tool detects negative mentions and instant solutions can be provided to the complainer.

7. Turn negative to positive:

Every customer looks for services and products that ease their burden worth their penny. They also expect good customer service. When customers aren’t happy with the brand or service, they are annoyed and get one step ahead and post negative comments on social media instead of work mail.

The reasons for such cases can be because they wanted to express public dissatisfaction or the company did not respond to their complaints. It would be pleasing for the customer to receive a prompt reply from. If not responded immediately then the customer’s huge followers would develop a bad impression about the brand or service in their minds.

8. Make a public statement:

There are more chances to get screwed up when a brand is mentioned in a negative mode. There may not be a fault from your side but negative mentions may be obtained. In any way, a further step needs to be taken and the customer is to be provided with an explanation. Ignoring the issue can escalate even further and worsen the situation. It is best to glance through a few success stories and follow the same strategy of apology messages.

9. Monitoring conversation:

Though you’ve marked the negative mention, taken steps to solve it, keep monitoring the conversation. The same mention would receive more mentions and needs to be responded.

Aspects to avoid with negative mentions:

There are a few reminders to be followed while dealing with negative mentions. It is important not to avoid the situation but move forward and handle it smartly. The marketing executive should not be combative, never contradict the complainer in any situation. When in an open medium, there should not be any heating dialogues as it may spoil the businesses reputation.

Do negative mentions hurt Google ranking?

Though there aren’t any direct impacts in rankings there would be drop due to the negative effect of unseen factors. Google algorithms are steadily improved and can get to know if any business has a bad reputation. Sites with the malicious and negative reputation are offered with a lower rating.

How Google react to negative brand mentions?

Google favors branded anchor text links and also keeps an eye on brand mentions. This helps Google to establish brand authority. More negative reviews have chances to affect the business deeply.

Search quality evaluator:

The good or bad cannot be determined by Google’s algorithm, humans hence must take responsibility. Apart from aiming at brand mentions, the quality of search results is improved. Manual actions to sites can be achieved by manual spam team. In this case, search quality evaluators have no chances to impact the search rankings. There are a few guidelines that need to be followed and offers feedback to Google.

The key norm is that malware containing harmful pages or phishing data would be provided with low BBB ratings by evaluators. The same would apply for sources that represent fraudulent behavior too. Fake news issues are also added to the list. There are fake news websites that develop fake stories so that they gain popularity on social media and also drive in more traffic. This is a way to make money from ads. For particular keywords, this fake news also ranks well in Google.

It is clearly understood that backlinks, social media hypes, and brand mentions can push ranking to the top. The ranking can remain for a long time on top unless it initiates violence. Fake news is battled by Google as their initiative is to work with the journalist. The search quality evaluators are important as they offer patterns used by fake news websites. By this way, a red flag is raised very easily.

Working of Google algorithm:

The feedback is obtained from evaluators and the data is compiled by Google. In this manner, malicious websites, fake news, and sites with a bad reputation are identified by Google.

Tools to track brand mentions:

Monitoring discussions about brands online is significant. By monitoring, track mentions one can gain reputation management opportunities, honest feedback, clear understanding and objective insight of people reacting to services and products. It is highly beneficial to watch brand mentions for many reasons. Several tools help in monitoring brand mentions, let’s glance through a few famed tools.

1. Social mention:

The main chore of social mention is to aggregate and monitor social mentions from various social media networks such as Twitter, Digg, facebook, youtube, etc. The best feature of the tool is that it detects the discussions of a particular keyword and offers an insight into the interactions and brand discussions. The visual format of the tool makes it easy to understand.

The tool offers all mentions regarding the brand. Along with that, it also offers brand strength data. This is the frequency of discussion about the brand on social media. This also includes passion, sentiment, and reach of the brand.

Passion is the repeated mentioning of the brand. The measure of influence is said to be reached. The ratio of negative and positive mentions is called sentiment and this shows the way the brand is perceived online. The tool also helps in taking a glance on the associated hashtags and keywords. The budget-friendly tool is a perfect choice for small businesses.

2. Awario:

A perfect brand monitoring tool that helps in monitoring brand mentions on all social media platforms. They also monitor on another website such as news sites and forums too. The tool is beneficial as it helps monitor mentions in millions of sources. The best feature of the tool is that it offers quick real-time data and alerts you when the brand is discussed. By this way, the marketer can be on the scenario to interact or act. 

The in-built browser in the tool helps to react in seconds at times of mentions without the need to leave the application. The browser is advantageous as private messages can be sent, reply and tweet within the browser. The reach metric in the tool is perfect as it offers enhanced data about the level of commenters. By this way, responses can be prioritized and tailored. 

3. Mention:

The tool is perfect for assessing multiple sources and setting up alerts. Just from the app, messages can be sent. The tool is easy to use as a collection of data, generation of results also in sharing alerts with co-workers. By this way, reputation and online presence of the brand are boosted. Influencers score is offered by the tool that represents commenters influence level. 

Alerts for a variety of categories can be set up and is easy to use. Hence as per choice, monitoring the alerts can be set up. The user just needs to pick from the options if it’s the product, the company, the competitor or anything else. They need to enter the keywords, the companies, or the sites they need to monitor. 

4. Hoot suite:

Apart from scheduling social media post, hoot suite is the best tool for tracking brand mentions. With this tool, particular phrases and keywords can also be tracked across social media. As the streams load in real-time, brand mentions can be tracked and responded easily. Hoot Suite is a budget-friendly as well as user-friendly option. 

5. Talkwalker alerts:

Tacking brand mentions and setting up alerts with talk walker is easy. Alerts can be set for keywords or brand that needs to be tracked. The sources of discussion, influencers brand discussion, sentiment analysis, and performance, etc. can be collected as data with this tool. There are also many other premium features available with the tool. 

Such tools are significant as keeping an eye on customer’s discussion online affects marketing strategies. Tracking conversations of brand mentions can be time-consuming, but these tools are beneficial as they have a variety of features in them.

6. Brand watch:

The brand watches provides detailed social data analytics. The pop-up window shows individual mentions as the statistics graph is clicked. The user can communicate by navigating to social media sites. There are three platforms provided they are the audiences, Vizia, and analytics. There are unique features provided by each. 

The analytics analyses the gathered data based on gender, sentiment, common words, location, etc. 

The Vizia assist in developing reports. The best part is that it assists in the integration of Buzz sumo, Google analytics, and hoot suite. This is done based on the metrics required. 

Audience assists incomplete audience research. This works based on keywords in the latest tweets, accounts, gender, etc. they follow. It is also a database on twitter. The on-going audience conversation can be known by getting to know their speech and with whom. 

Conclusion:

The fact is that negative brand mentions do not have an impact directly on search engine ranking. There are chances for these mentions to be lower branded searches when compared with others, and then SEO consequences are suffered. The above-mentioned tips can help to handle negative brand mentions and solve issues as soon as possible.

Such brand mentions are unavoidable and are to be carried smartly. The customer is to be satisfied and brand reputation should also be maintained. Hence the various tools can be used for assistance. So responding behind every mention is very important. 

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