Marketing Byte: How Franchises Track and Manage Their Online Reputations

Franchise Update Media recently released its 2025 Annual Franchise Marketing Leadership Report. The AFMR is a survey of top franchise marketing executives that provides insights into the latest consumer behavior trends, innovative marketing strategies, technology, and the impact of digital transformation on franchise businesses.

The AFMR is the first and only report dedicated to B2B and B2C franchise marketing leaders. It includes perspectives from industry experts about the evolving market dynamics and how franchises can stay ahead of the competition. This report delivers data collected from franchisors across the franchise community with responses organized by industry, marketing budget, system-wide sales, and more.

The annual report provides franchisors with the ideal resource for studying their marketing investments, benchmarking their sales and advertising budgets against their own industry categories, as well as setting goals and budgets for the year ahead. The AFMR also includes research into digital advertising practices, the growing investment in mobile and social platforms, and best practices in building marketing teams.

Over the last several years, the AFMR was expanded to include more information about online reputation management and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). It starts by identifying how many franchises are using AI and in which ways, along with their confidence in using the technology. It also looks at how the integration of AI has impacted the customer experience, its challenges and limitations, and their plans for future investment in AI. The report also explores franchisee involvement, franchisee training and support, and feedback from customers regarding the use of AI.

Tracking online reputations

The rise of the internet age and social media over the last several decades has dramatically changed the reputation of a business and how it is publicly perceived. Customer ratings, reviews, or comments are often the first or primary things a customer sees when researching a brand. A negative score can greatly impact a brand’s reputation, and many companies work hard to ensure a bad review is far outweighed by positive reviews and comments.

While negative reviews are unavoidable, it is important for a company to track and manage them in real time. Without doing so, the wrong review can spread quickly online and hurt the perception of the company with new and existing customers.

With so many platforms for public feedback and their vital role in shaping a brand’s reputation, many businesses closely track these comments and reviews. While much of it is done at the corporate level, some brands have their franchisees or a third-party company handle those responsibilities.

In the latest AFMR, we asked franchises how they track and manage their online reputations. It included questions about the metrics and platforms they used to monitor comments and reviews, the challenges they face in online management, and whether it is handled in-house or outsourced.

There were seven different primary metrics that franchise brands in the survey used to track online reputation: sentiment analysis, online reviews, social media mentions, brand mentions, engagement metrics, website traffic, and conversion rates. Not surprisingly, the most popular form of tracking online reputation came through online reviews and social media mentions. One hundred percent of the food and retail food brands said they track through online reviews, while 95 percent of brick-and-mortar service brands also use online reviews.

There are many different platforms and tools that can track a brand’s online reputation, and we asked survey respondents which ones they used the most. Review monitoring platforms that aggregate reviews from sites like Google, Yelp, and social media received the highest responses from franchises in the food (86 percent) and brick-and-mortar services (74 percent) industries. Sixty-seven percent of retail food brands used review monitoring platforms, which is the same percentage of those franchises that used social media monitoring tools. Seventy-one percent of food franchises used social media monitoring tools, which include tools such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite.

Given the vast amount of metrics and platforms brands use in tracking their online reputation and the importance of doing so, we also asked about the greatest challenges they face in managing the process. Some of the primary issues listed were managing negative feedback, monitoring across platforms, maintaining consistency, responding to crisis situations, competitor monitoring, and adapting to algorithm changes. The most consistently shared challenge, regardless of industry, was monitoring across platforms. Other challenges that received at least 50 percent of the category responses were maintaining consistency (56 percent, retail food), managing negative feedback (50 percent, food), monitoring across platforms (50 percent, retail), and adapting to algorithm changes (50 percent, retail).

Even with the variety of metrics, platforms, and challenges that go into tracking an online reputation, most franchises handle it at the corporate level. Eighty-nine percent of retail food franchises said the corporate office manages the process. On average, slightly fewer than a quarter of the respondents said franchisees handle online reputation management. Three categories said a third party manages their online reputation, with non-brick-and-mortar service brands being the highest to do so (43 percent).

For more information about the 2025 AFMR and how you can purchase the report, read more HERE.