An individual or a business’s online reputation is a crucial part of their first impression today. In our globalized world, consumers have infinite choices and great power to access information. How you portray yourself online decides your market value and relevance, and your personal image determines your social acceptance. To uplift and correct their public image, companies all over the world hire PR teams, lawyers, advisors, etc. However, for an individual or a startup, those solutions may not be feasible.
Thus, here are a few ways you can begin to maintain and monitor your public image:
1. Track Online Reviews
Online reviews are especially important if you run a brick-and-mortar business or act as an independent service provider. Take inventory of what’s out there now on Google, Yelp, and other review websites, as well as on your own page. Address any negative comments and try to provide a solution.
Be sure to encourage people who really love your products or services to provide reviews. Sometimes people have a great product or service, but only one person leaves a review, and it’s negative (for whatever reason). That might scare off potential new customers.
Also, check what’s out there on social media such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and assign or hire someone to manage all of these spaces to make sure your company is always reflected in a good light.
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2. Hire a Reputation Management Company
If you have a larger organization, it may be wise to hire a company that specifically handles ORM. Doing so can truly save you in a crisis with prevention or mediation. The main goal of a reputation management company is not to mislead the consumer, but to create balance through highlighting the positive aspects of a client’s reputation.
Steps that Reputation Management Companies Take:
- Assess and Analyze: One of the first things a reputation management company does is assess what content and reviews are on the web to see whether they are positive or negative. From there, they can plan a strategy on how to build the company’s image.
- SEO: After the initial assessment, reputation management companies will implement a long-term strategy around SEO (search engine optimization). This gives companies more control over what comes up first when people conduct a search on Google, etc. SEO can be improved by increasing rankings of positive content that comes up in search results and creating content around negative material to mitigate damage.
In short, what comes up on the first few pages when people are searching on your company or your industry? According to a Forrester study, 71 percent of consumers start their customer journey with a Google search, so what’s out there truly matters. - Social media listening: ORM companies will assess what’s happening on all social media accounts, notice when trends change over time, and actively work to resolve negative feedback, which is important for customer retention.
- Manage customer reviews: Sites like Yelp and Google, have a major impact on ORM. A reputation management company will assess and resolve any potentially harmful situations that might occur from customer comments and feedback.
3. Make Google Your Friend
If you do not want to hire an online reputation management company, a great way to do it on your own is to use a dashboard to monitor everything that’s being said about your business, all in one place.
This method is called Brand Monitoring. You can download and leverage applications to help you with this process, such as Awario, Agorapulse, Keyhole, Falcon, Brand24, and more. You can also set up Google notifications, called Google Alerts, which sends you email alerts any time your brand or name is mentioned. You can customize the alerts you receive, and it’s completely free.
Lastly, perform a search audit regularly by Googling yourself or your company to see what comes up. If anything negative appears, you can start your investigation and either contact the site owner to remove the content or directly reach out to the person to try to rectify the situation.
4. Manage Social Media Regularly
Whether you hire a social media manager or manage your online reputation yourself, you need to be tracking what’s going on in your social media channels every single day.
When customers are upset and they can’t reach you directly, most often they’ll head to your social media channels to complain. If this goes unnoticed by the company, more people will comment, and soon the small complaint might snowball into a larger negative conversation. Keeping track of and actively engaging in conversations with people will prevent this from happening, and it will keep your customers happier, too.
Keep an eye on your notifications and alerts. Platforms such as Hootsuite let you monitor every social media channel in one place (your dashboard), so you’ll never miss a comment.
If you’re running Facebook or other social media ads, it’s important to track comment activity, too, as this is separate from your regular social media posts. A simple way to do this is create a spreadsheet of all your Facebook/Instagram/Google ads, with links.
Click on a box next to Ad Preview, and a dropdown menu will appear that allows you to see the Facebook Post or Instagram post with comments. After you click the links, you’ll have a hyperlink you can add to the spreadsheet to give to your social media manager if you’re delegating. Then, you can see and interact with the comments when necessary.
Source: Shutterstock
5. Stay on Top of Your Blog & Hashtags
If you have a blog, keep track of what’s being said in the comments. Often, if people find you through an article online, before they even see your product or homepage, they may see someone’s comment, so it’s important to make sure the responses are mostly positive. If someone had a bad experience or left a negative comment, reach out to that person and see how you can resolve the situation, post an authentic and empathetic response, or work to suppress it.
Another way to keep track of your business is by following hashtags on social media. Following hashtags is a great way to track what’s being said about you, and as a side benefit, it will cue you in on what your competitors are doing. Be sure to add the name of the organization, like #bobsdonuts, and you’ll be able to see any content that comes up with those hashtags.
Here are examples of the hashtags you could follow for Bob’s Donuts:
#bobsdonuts
#donuts
#doughnuts
#bobsdoughnuts
#greatdonuts
#artisinaldonuts
#glutenfreedonuts
#vegandonuts
#sprinkledonuts
#baddonuts
#bobs
If you feel overwhelmed keeping track of everything that’s being said online, hire someone, whether it’s a social media manager or an online reputation management company, or assign someone in your company this additional responsibility.
ORM could be a crucial factor that will stunt or significantly grow your business. Keeping track of customer feedback also helps with suggestions and things you can do to make your customers even happier. Trust us, it’s worth it.
At TechWyse Internet Marketing, we offer top-of-the-line Reputation Management services to businesses looking to improve their online presence. We also offer SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Management, and other digital marketing services that can take you to the top. To schedule an appointment, call 866-288-6046 or contact us here.
