One of the most important aspects of your business today is your reputation. Since the world is becoming so socially connected, word of mouth and consumer reviews can dictate whether a business is successful or not. Reputation management is more about prevention than it is about reacting to one or two upset customers. It is also important to recognize that you need to develop and manage your online reputation even if your company does not sell anything online. In this article, we will cover five steps you should take to build a positive reputation online. The good news is that most of the things you can do to help your company's online reputation are all free of charge and only cost the time and effort you put into developing them. When you follow our guidelines, the results will more than pay for your efforts.
- Set Up Your Social Media Channels: Even if you don't have time to post to and manage all of the social networks, you should develop and claim your vanity url so that no other company can gain possession of it. You never know if you might want to use it in the future and at the same time, you wouldn't want anyone else impersonating your company. Once you set up the channels, fill in all of the profile information for each one. If you are not planning to post and maintain each one, maybe choose one or two to post to and then post a message on each of the others to connect with you on the one you are using. Your social channels will come up high in the search engine results when someone is searching for your company. It is best to maintain and control the listings that appear in search results rather than having other results come up when potential customers are looking for information about your company.
- Claim Your Google Listing: Each company has a profile in Google, it is connected to Google Plus and Google Maps. When you claim the listing, you can edit and control what it says and ensure that your phone number, address, and information are all correct. Your address will be used in Google Maps for GPS directions. Add in as many keyword rich details you can about your company in the description and add photos as well. When you describe your company, be sure to write your description to inform people who do not know what your business is about.
- Claim All Other Directory Listings: There are plenty of other directory sites that have done the search engine optimization for you and will help your company appear in more search engine results, thereby helping your positive reputation with more listings that you control the details about. Directory listings can include Yelp, Urban Spoon, Yahoo!, Yellow Pages, and any other listings that come up when you search for businesses in your area or industry.
- Encourage Customers to Review their Experiences: Many companies are afraid of online reviews; however it is important to recognize that people are going to talk about your company so you mine-as-well control the listings and monitor them. The other thing many people do not recognize is that while it is common for the few disgruntled customers to be more vocal, if you regularly ask all your customers for reviews, they will also contribute their positive experiences and that will outweigh the negative comments. Follow best practices about responding to online reviews and you can often turn a negative review into a positive by finding a solution for an upset customer and showing the public that you care about and resolve problems.
- Monitor Your Name in the Media and Online: There are tools that are available to help you monitor your reputation online. It is important that you find a media monitoring service that is specific to your market and your country. For example, iSentia specializes in media monitoring and social media tools that are country specific. If you need to monitor your reputation in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and more. When you know about your mentions online, you can react quickly. The quicker your reaction, the sooner you can capitalize on a positive media mention or prevent a reputation problem from getting worse.
Conclusion
In summary, your online reputation and media mentions are important to the success of your company. Building your own reputation helps prevent a few negative comments or reviews from standing out and damaging your business. Setting up your own social channels, your Google listing, claiming directory listings, and encouraging online reviews from your customers all help to build a positive reputation for your business. Once you have this good start, it is important to monitor your online, social, and media mentions using tools available to do so efficiently.