Great Tips for managing your Online Reputation and Social Media
The world is highly competitive and with the internet, there are both advantages and disadvantages. You can use the internet to make sure your company has the success that you dream of. To ensure you are not lost in a sea of competitors, you need to have a great online presence and also good content that is relevant to your work. This is where web media, digital marketing and also using technology in general come to your advantage.
Google revolutionised the internet. Now, everyone searches online to find what they need. It can be about you, your business, your services or even your reviews. Ideally when they do this, they should get to know about your work and also some positive reviews. If you are not careful about the online content, you might end up being lost in a sea of competitors or a single bad experience can reflect all around and bounce back and forth casting a bad shadow on your online presence. You have to be careful about how you maintain and handle all of this or hire someone who can do it for you. All businesses are now focusing on SEO, ORM, and social media to use them to their advantage, and that is what you should do, too.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the new buzzword. It is not covering up something wrong or fancying things up but just a careful representation of true facts. All businesses can benefit from some ORM. It generally is to have an idea of what your online reputation is currently and what can be done to make it better. If there is more positive content about you, your business looks better and so does your online persona. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is done to make sure your brand gets the attention it deserves and to make sure people know what your services are. Your website should make sure it has the right keywords, so a search engine leads a user to your website.
Here are a some tips to maintain your online reputation and make a business out of it:
Own Your Search Results
The first step is to have a lot of pages devoted to your business and make sure that they are the first page that comes up in a search result on the same name. This is what is called “owning” your results. It begins with simple things like buying a domain name and having a quality website for your company. You can go on and create online profiles on all Social Media sites with the same name and then all the top results would be linked to your actual homepage. Be sure that you continuously promote your content and keep publicizing it till it reaches the top of the page rank list.
Use software to your benefits
You don’t have to Google your company’s name everyday manually and scan through the results. There are so many software that can do this, and everything is now automated. Google Alerts is a free tool that looks up a set of keywords that you want and sends all the websites and new results to your mailbox.
There are several other tools (some are free while you will have to pay for some others), and they can all monitor the mentions that come up on any sites. Monitoring your online presence is more than essential to having a good online reputation.
Stay in touch
Once you know what people have to say about you, the next step is to learn how to handle it and respond to them. Reviews especially are very important online and they affect you a lot. There are too many websites where people can share their reviews about your products and your services. Also, people might write about you on Twitter and Facebook, and it gets a lot of public attention.
In any case, whatever the platform is, you should make sure that you respond in time and keep in touch with your customers. If there is a positive review, acknowledge it with grace and thank them for it. If there is a negative review, do the same and then work on improving the customer’s experience.
Have a blog
Blogging has gained so much popularity in the last decade and is now a powerful tool for information. Having a blog allows you to come up and post all the innovative and unique content, and that will increase your popularity. You can have simple blog posts or videos or even podcasts to be shared with everyone.
The advantage of having a blog is that it generally ranks well and high on all search engines. You can also keep in touch with people through comments. Blogs are a good way to spread some general information and then publicise your products along with it. This can expand your social and professional network on the internet. Blogs are cheap and yet a powerful tool to connect to the world.
Expand your horizons
Once you get a basic hang of how to manage your online presence, you can start thinking of doing bigger things. For example, the search engine journal is a place that gets so many visitors every day. If you post some good content there, you get exposure while SEJ gets some good content. Everyone is looking for great content online so if you do have it, you should share it and make the best of it. This exposure does a lot of good for your brand and takes you to new people in new fields. You never know how information flows, and it could be shared to reach someone who was looking for the service you provide.
The future of every company lies in how they use technology, social media, blogs and press coverage to their advantage. Online reputation is very important, and ultimately it is in your hand to take care of it. All big firms make sure that they are in touch with their customers (or fans) and take care of their online presence. For example, Sony, Apple, HP, and Google have great customer interactions online. These companies have small issues but, in the long run, they are well connected to the world, and this is what your company should try to achieve.
Now that you have an idea of how the whole world works in the Online reputation market go ahead and Google your brand. Use the above tips and get working on taking your company ahead in the race.
