4 Strategies for Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation

Do you know what people are saying about your brand online? If not, this post will explain why it’s important to understand the general sentiment of your brand and how to take an active role in managing it.

Unless you’re running a brick-and-mortar business in a small town where you rely mostly on foot traffic, your online reputation probably matters a ton. But let’s say you do have a business in a smaller corner of the world. Even if your business is primarily from foot traffic, online search could open up your physical operation to a new set of customers.

In other words, online reputation management is for everyone, no matter how big or small, global or local their venture may be.

In this post, we’re going to look at a 2025 survey that shows how consumers depend on online reviews and then use these insights to explore various strategies to help you keep your brand’s reputation on the up and up.

4 Strategies for Better Brand Reputation Management

What does online reputation management entail exactly? It’s a process of monitoring what people are saying about your brand as well as the overall user sentiment. In addition, the process involves managing and influencing your reputation through a variety of strategies.

BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2025 gives us some insights into what some of these effective strategies are.

1. Know Where People Are Talking

The web is like the Wild Wild West. Even if you direct users or customers to a single platform to leave reviews, they could realistically venture off to the far corners of the internet to share something about your business.

You have no control over where your brand gets name-dropped, which means you need to keep a watchful eye over as many of these platforms as you can.

To start, BrightLocal found that 74% of users check at least two websites when researching a company. If we’re talking strictly about review websites, these are the most popular ones that consumers refer to:

• Google (83%)
• Yelp (44%)
• Facebook (40%)
• Tripadvisor (22%)
• Better Business Bureau (20%)

If we’re taking into consideration other sources of information, 48% of consumers go to their local news source, while 34% check YouTube.

While these are the most popular, they’re not the only ones available either. For example, consumers could use:

• Apps like Angi and Thumbtack where people hire and rate service providers
• Niche review sites like HealthGrades for medical providers
• The Nextdoor app for local businesses
• Directories for your industry, like Trustpilot and G2 Reviews
• Forum communities like Reddit

In addition, if you run an ecommerce business, your own product pages may be chock full of customer reviews.

There are so many places people can tell others about their experience with your brand. So, how do you keep tabs on all of it?

To start, invest in a social listening tool. At the very least, this will help you aggregate what’s being talked about and analyze the general sentiment with regards to your brand. You can also learn a ton about what your target users want, their biggest pain points, as well as the kind of wording they use to describe you (which can be useful in your own messaging).

Secondly, create or claim your brand’s page on relevant platforms:

• Google Business is a must for local businesses, though anyone could benefit.
• Niche review platforms (like Yelp and Tripadvisor) based on your business type.
• Social media apps where your users are most active.

Lastly, set up Google Alerts for your brand. These are alerts that notify you when your brand (or a related keyword, name or tagline) is mentioned in search results.

In this example, I’ve entered the name of my business as the search term. Google then gives me the ability to configure parameters for the search results, like language, region, sources, frequency of notifications and so on.

If someone has written about your brand online and it’s not on one of the channels you’re already monitoring, Google may be able to find it for you.

2. Encourage People to Talk

What’s that old saying? No news is good news? On the internet, though, that might not work in your favor.

According to BrightLocal’s survey respondents, people not only want to find reviews on a company they’re researching. They also want them to be recent.

Let’s start with the matter of quantity.

Consumers equate the quantity of reviews with a business’s trustworthiness.

• 16% expect to see 0 to 19 reviews
• 33% want to see 20 to 49
• 22% want to see 50 to 99
• 14% would prefer more than 100

For only 15%, the quantity of reviews doesn’t matter. More than twice that want to see at least 20 reviews.

So, you’re going to need to get people talking. And keep them talking.

The survey revealed that consumers expect brands to keep the reviews rolling in. Only 8% said that the date that a review was posted wouldn’t impact their decision-making.

However, the vast majority believe that the more recent a review, the greater an impact it will have on their decision to trust and use a business.

• 20% want reviews posted within the last 2 weeks
• 27% within 1 month
• 21% within 3 months
• 13% within 6 months
• 11% within 1 year

This is also supported by sorting habits on Google. 45% of users sort review results by Newest, which is more than any other qualifier. The second most popular is Sort by highest rating with 39%.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of your target users. For instance, let’s say you’re looking to license some software. You go on G2 to look up the business. It has a pretty good rating. However, the last review someone left was from 13 months ago.

If I were you, I’d be wondering what happened. Did the company go under? Did they stop supporting the product? Have they stopped innovating and so there’s nothing new for anyone to say?

So, the first thing we need to deal with here is actually getting people to talk about your brand. You can’t assume that every satisfied customer or otherwise is going to run to their favorite platform to review you.

According to BrightLocal, 4% of people never leave a review. Only 29% have left a review in the past year. That’s not a lot. So, you need to put in a decent-sized effort in order to get a meaningful return on it.

Here are the most common reasons why people don’t bother writing reviews and what you can do about it:

29% said their experience wasn’t noteworthy enough. If customer service isn’t your strong suit or the digital experience of your product is just so-so, step up your game.

If your brand isn’t standing out and going above and beyond, of course it’s going to seem like a waste of time. Plus, you run the risk of customers going onto a review platform, giving you three stars, and saying it was “Just OK.”

So, if your business needs improvement, work on that. Then create an automated process to email your users and request a review. Like after a satisfying customer support call, post-purchase or 24 hours after their visit. Let them know how much you appreciate their business, ask them for a review and make the submission process easy.

17% said they don’t have time to leave a review. Now, this won’t be feasible for everyone. However, if you actually converse with your users, take down notes from your conversations or capture details from your written correspondence. Then put together a review or testimonial for customers that had a truly stellar experience.

This is something I’ve done both as a writer and designer. I’ll take highlights from our discussion, throw together a testimonial, and send it to them. I explain how important reviews are for helping me get more business and that, if they feel so inclined, I’d really appreciate their help. I share the quote I wrote, invite them to edit it, and then I post it for them on my website. As a bonus, I link to their website to give them extra visibility.

16% said they don’t want to have to create an account. Collecting your own testimonials and sharing them on your website is one way to get around this objection. Another way is by setting yourself up on platforms that don’t require an account.

Google is likely a safe choice as many people have Gmail addresses (even as backups). Or you can invite them to leave reviews on social media. If you give them two options—like Facebook and Instagram—they’ll be more likely to have access to at least one.

3. Respond to Public Feedback

If you look over other companies’ social media pages or Google Reviews, you might find that the only time followers get a public response back is when they’ve said something negative. For others, they ignore the negative and only respond to the positive.

In the minds of consumers, that’s not enough. According to the BrightLocal report, 89% of people are more likely to use a business if it has a track record of responding to all reviews.

Although 44% don’t seem to mind if a business doesn’t respond to reviews at all, it seems risky to take that gamble. Not to mention quite costly. You could potentially be turning off 56% of all prospective customers who see that your brand remains quiet in the face of customer feedback.

Imagine if a movie star got caught up in a scandal and didn’t address the incident in question. People would keep talking about it. They’d come to their own conclusions and probably assume that whatever bad thing that came out was true. It would very likely cost the star their reputation, earnings and more.

That’s not to say that one unaddressed negative review or comment online will send your company into a tailspin. But think about the ramifications of leaving it out there for people to ponder on. What’s more, the person who took the time to leave that comment may go on to tell even more people about how the brand didn’t even bother to apologize or try to make amends.

One bad experience and review rarely stay with just that one person.

So, if you don’t yet have a policy for managing online reviews or feedback, now is the time to come up with one.

For starters, determine which platforms you’re going to monitor and take the time to address. Google Alerts and social listening tools will help you keep tabs on a lot of what’s being said about you online. This will allow you to focus your energy on the platforms that are deserving of most of your attention. These may include Google Reviews, Facebook and Yelp. Or they may be more niche depending on what space you operate in.

Secondly, assign this responsibility to a team member (or a few). At the very least, there should be one person overseeing all of your brand reputation management efforts, even if they’re not the one responding to every message.

Then, decide how frequently you’re going to log into these platforms and respond. A 24-hour response time seems fair enough, so once a day is probably a good place to start, especially if online comments don’t come in too frequently.

Next, come up with a strategy for responding to customer reviews. I know that some companies prefer to use a canned response that directs disgruntled customers to contact them offline right away. However, this could end up making your brand seem disingenuous if people looking at the reviews realize no effort is put into responding if everyone receives the same message.

Here are some tips for how to craft each response:

• Respond quickly (within 24 hours).
• Keep emotion and judgment out of your responses.
• Be fair, accept accountability and apologize when in the wrong.
• Be transparent and detailed, summarizing the situation and dispelling inaccuracies, if needed.
• Be empathetic and helpful if the customer seems stuck or you can help them in another way.
• Work toward a resolution if the reviewer is dissatisfied. The resolution doesn’t need to be made public and you can take the conversation offline if they’re open to it.
• Be gracious when they have something positive to say.

Also, take care in writing each response. According to the survey, customers feel better about reviews that are well-written, so run your responses through a grammar/proofreading checker.

You don’t need to write a book in response to every comment or review made about your brand. However, taking the time to acknowledge what someone wrote will go a long way in showing that you appreciate their business, time and input and want to continue doing better for them.

4. Create Your Own (Helpful) Content

I’ve heard people suggest that if you publish enough positive press releases or hire enough influencers to push your brand, that you can change the narrative that way. Or, at the very least, drown out the noise from any bad press you’ve gotten.

Here’s the problem with that:

The BrightLocal survey sought to find out what makes people suspicious of reviews.
According to their responses, there are certain telltale signs:

• 48% said they’d be suspicious if it felt like it was written by AI
• 42% looked for signs that it was part of paid campaign or incentive

The other signs mentioned suggest that either the brand was behind writing the over-the-top praise or that the competition wrote a particularly scathing review.

Consumers don’t want to feel as though they’ve been tricked into trusting a brand (or in mistrusting them). As the rest of the survey demonstrates, they put a good deal of faith in online reviews to help them make decisions. At the same time, it’s clear that they’re wary of being deceived.

It might be faster to pay for an influencer or AI bot campaign to override all the negative news and reviews about you. But if you’re running a dishonest business, people will eventually find out about it. Even if they’ve already bought something from you.

This happened to me recently. I dropped my car at an auto body repair shop that also sold cars. It was an emergency and I needed a big repair done right away. I found them on Google with a 4.6-star review. I didn’t have time to read through anything, so I dropped my car off and waited. And waited. And waited.

After three phone calls and 30 hours of waiting, I hadn’t received an update on my car. So I went digging through their reviews. Turns out, they’d incentivized car buyers to leave 5-star reviews. Their page was inundated with these positive reviews. But the second I looked at the 1-star reviews, it was all from very recent service customers with horror story after horror story.

Bottom line: You can’t artificially concoct a positive reputation. It might work for getting some short-term sales, but it’ll cost you over the long term.

So, what should you do instead if you have a slew of not-so-good reviews?

To start, take that feedback and use it to improve your operation. If people complain about the same things, you know exactly what you need to do.

Then, work on building trust around your brand. In addition to responding genuinely to your online reviews, develop high-quality, helpful content. This may include:

• Social media content that’s educational and entertaining, even if it doesn’t garner you a new lead or sale
• Blog posts that equip your audience with knowledge for free
• Case studies that show how things improved for real-world customers
• Documentation, FAQs and other helpful resources that explain common scenarios and roadblocks with your services or products
• Explainer YouTube videos that help people take the DIY approach (or decide that it’s not for them)

In fact, the videos might be the best place to start. According to the survey, 36% of consumers watch videos made by businesses where they discuss their offerings. Compared to 31% who prefer to watch everyday people talking about ’ services or products, this shows that consumers really appreciate when brands are authentically helpful.

Wrapping Up

Your online reputation may be the first thing that visitors discover about your brand. If you don’t try to get a handle on it, it could end up being wildly inaccurate, over-the-top negative and harm your business in the process. (Because you never know what people are saying … If they’re even saying anything at all.)

With a good online reputation strategy, your brand can:

• Make a strong first impression
• Build trust with prospective customers
• Improve your brand’s overall online reputation (as high ratings can help with ranking, especially in Google and review engine algorithms)

This can also be a really good learning opportunity for everyone on your team. While online brand reputation management can be stressful at times, there’s a lot you can learn from these reported first-hand experiences and sentiments. Keep track of what you’ve learned and use it to hone your business strategy in the future.

Next up: How to Do A/B Testing for Websites: A Practical Guide for Optimization