Hootsuite adds user reviews by integrating ReviewTrackers

User-generated content — including reviews — has become one of the most important ways that buyers get feedback about products from other buyers.

It’s why Adobe bought Livefyre last year for its Marketing Cloud. And it’s why social media management platform Hootsuite announced today an integration with online reputation management tool ReviewTrackers.

Chris Campbell, CEO of ReviewTrackers, told me this is the first time Hootsuite has integrated a review management tool into its dashboard, although there may have been some related external functionality in Hootsuite’s marketplace of third-party applications.

Founded in 2012 and based in Chicago, ReviewTrackers provides reviews for a given brand or its locations from more than 85 review sources, including Yelp, Google+, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Foursquare.

With the integration, ReviewTrackers’ reviews appear as a stream in the Hootsuite dashboard, the way Instagram might similarly be added:

In the dashboard, users can see a review in the context of related social posts and take action on a review by responding, tagging, sharing or assigning it. Analytics for those reviews, which include sentiment assessment and text parsing for keywords, still appear in the ReviewTracker application, although Campbell said the two companies are working to make the analytics available inside Hootsuite.

Campbell noted that Sprinklr is Hootsuite’s only major competitor that includes user reviews. But, he added, ReviewTracker differs because of the availability of a Review Generation Suite to help brands request reviews from users, and he said it has a more extensive mobile capability.