Brand Management: 5 Tips to Manage Your Reputation Online

2021.04.26 01:14 PM By Joshua Taddeo, Principal Consultant

What is Reputation Management?

Flourishing a newly launched business is not a piece of cake. You have to come up with amazing content to retain your audience and deliver everything to perfection. One lousy mistake and one angry comment, and your entire brand image goes down the drain. But why is it so important to maintain an image online? Why is it so important to be bothered by what others have to say? Why does it matter if we get one negative comment?

Launching a business is now easier than ever. You can invest in the products, take a picture, and upload it on a social media account. The people will see your product and make a decision whether they like it or not. As easy as it has become, it has also been overwhelming. There is crazy competition on social platforms where everyone has been trying to make it as an entrepreneur.

Your active online presence makes your brand a success. What you post, how you manage your page, and how you react to the comments coming your way make all the difference. If you proactively interact with the audience, it is going to leave a mark where they will know you and accept you, and will remember you the next time they need the product. Your online presence is one of the most important factors in a company’s success or failure.

We have covered some of the challenges we have seen specifically with managing online platforms and leveraging search engines, as well as the impact of social media on your company’s reputation. In this guide, you will learn why your company’s online presence is so important, how it can be managed, and how to take the necessary steps to ensure that your brand is well represented wherever it appears.

Let us delve deeper into the concept of online presence, how it has evolved, how it looks today, and how you can use it to build your personal and brand reputation to boost your business.

What is Reputation Management?

Reputation management is all about monitoring your brand’s image and your customer’s perception of the brand. The goal is establishing brand awareness and business progress. It is a process in which we take necessary measures to improve the brand’s reputation and help the audience perceive it in a positive light. Through reputation management, the audience learns what your business is truly about.

Let us first discuss the basics of social media and its impact on your company’s reputation.

Importance of Social Media Management

Your online reputation is primarily built on social media platforms. Social media, reviews, websites, and profiles are important online features that can help you manage your brand’s reputation and engage with your target audience. Today, people are more tech-savvy in selling and marketing businesses, and consumers are beginning to value other customers’ opinions.

Online reviews have a way of leaving an impact on a new buyer. No matter how many good things you say about your brand, reviews from users out rule your word, determining the fate of the products you sell. Customers not only value the online rating but are also more likely to pay more for services provided by companies with higher ratings than those without it.

Almost every other person has access to these social media platforms where they spend hours and hours looking for different products. Therefore, it is now imperative more than ever to maintain an online presence so that more people pursue your brand. It doesn’t matter whether you have started your business on your own or you have people working for you, maintaining a social presence gives you an edge.

If someone is happy about your brand, they will tell others about it, who will spread the word further. It can be beneficial for your brand as more and more people will end up approaching you. On the other hand, if someone is unhappy with your services, they will tell someone else who will tell someone else, creating a trickling effect that could harm your reputation with potential buyers who you haven’t reached yet. Before you know it, a whole bunch of people will end up hating or having a negative opinion of your product before even using it. They will refrain from approaching your brand, damaging your name in the market. This is how media presence builds your image in the market. You need to be mindful of a few things before you dive into this tricky business.

There are many tips and tricks you can use to manage your presence on social media platforms. When tens of millions of people see your business profile on social platforms, people will talk about it.

Tips To Manage Your Reputation Online

The first thing that is needed for an online reputation management strategy is a good reputation management plan for your company’s website and social media accounts. One of the most important steps to better manage your online reputation and strengthen your business is the right reputation management strategy. You can even hire a strategy consulting service for this purpose.

This strategy involves interacting with the audience proactively, responding to their reviews, no matter how good or bad they are, and keeping an eye out for negative SEO and reviews.

Here are some tips on how to use digital marketing channels to build and manage a healthy online reputation for your business

1. Monitor Your Social Footprint - track and monitor mentions

Keeping tabs on people’s reviews is a must! Always keep an eye out for what others say about your brand and how the audience perceives it in the online world. Train your employees so that they deal with the audience in a professional, polite manner. Misbehaving with the audience and denying their claims will only throw dirt on your brand’s name. Therefore, it is extremely important to address their concerns and listen to what they have to say. Not everyone has a temperament for it. You need to train your social media moderators how to handle a negative situation with utmost poise and dignity. Otherwise, it can affect your online reputation.

People talk about your brand online, so you need to build and manage your reputation proactively. If you don’t actively monitor and improve your online reputation, you’ll miss the opportunity to grow your brand, gather social evidence, and start new businesses.

When it comes to managing your online reputation, it is also important to monitor your social media footprint by scanning all your social media posts so you can find and delete old posts that could damage your reputation. Negative comments move at the speed of light in online space, and if you don’t catch them and respond in time, you have a negative impact on people’s views of your business.

Social media is essentially a huge echo chamber for people’s views, and if people are not happy with the way you do business, they will write angry messages that will have a negative effect on your business. There are times when small complaints can get out of hand very quickly, ruining your company name in the process. Those companies that are widely known for their huge business presence are most affected in this regard. For them, a complaint can turn into a movement within hours. Their flaws are exposed on social media, and before they know it, it could turn into a complete public disaster.

Fortunately, there are various tools you can use to ensure that you never miss a mention of a brand or product name. If someone mentions you or posts a positive tweet about your product, you can immediately take notice of it, retweet their post, and thank them for their kind words. People like to be acknowledged.

The key to effective online reputation management is to recognize the mentions of your brand so that you can minimize negative comments and amplify positive ones. When things get out of hand, an unsatisfied customer can react quickly. As soon as it happens, get involved and offer solutions. By doing so, you can find more information about your audience, the use of the product, and how it can affect your brand’s integrity.

2. Consistency Across All Social Platforms

Now let’s discuss strategies that can help your brand achieve prominence across all social media channels.

It is a common practice these days that before stepping out to buy something, most consumers check companies online. Let your website be the first place they go to find more information and what they are looking for. Understanding how your customers use the Web is part of effective online reputation management. When potential customers search your business, your social interactivity, efficient presence, and effective strategy to handle the feedback come before them, after which they decide if they want to choose your brand or not.

Consistency in your social media profiles benefits you in many ways. It helps people discover you and remember you. It also sends a message that your brand is authentic, original, and reliable.

Ideally, use the same username on all your social accounts and use the same for your website and other social media sites to create consistency and easier retention.

Register with one of the main social media sites before using them, to use a personal brand, and to secure ownership of the name of your website. This way, people cannot use your brand names for something that has nothing to do with you. You should also maintain the consistency of the content you post on your social networks. In general, this could mean that your color scheme, logo, and layout are similar in all your profiles. It also means ensuring that your messages are consistent and brand-appropriate. For example, you can use similar images and styles and use the same filters for all your Instagram photo

3. Encourage Reviews

Online reviews are a powerful tool to attract customers, especially early in the buying cycle. If you have a large customer base, create an email marketing campaign that encourages customers to submit reviews. Ask questions about your brand’s reputation on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Ask your audience for reviews, including Google and Yelp ratings.

You can also ask your customers to express their views about your brand. Expand your collection of reviews. More and more people will give you a rating if you ask for it, and if you do so, it can help build a positive image for your brand. Customers who search for your products and services value online reviews, and Google and Yelp reviews are the most prominent because they appear on the front page, making your brand more trustworthy and valued by customers.

In the online world, both brand ambassadors and critics have the right to express their opinions, and you have to take everyone’s opinion into account. Consumers have all the power that can be used to influence your business’s online perception.

Your words will be the first thing potential customers look for when they judge your company’s reputation. Don’t be shy about asking for reviews; develop a system to promote reviews and ensure that satisfied customers can easily provide feedback without having to put in a lot of effort. Set good customer reviews on your website and social media to encourage them to buy more.

Try to motivate good customers by offering them special offers they won’t be able to refuse! Another important note is to listen to reviews, both positive and negative. If negative content about your brand appears online, there are strategies to mitigate this.

Adherence to an improved online reputation management strategy can put your business in a stronger position and help you combat negative comments and reviews that may harm the business. Online reputation management can save your day, not only in terms of customer satisfaction but also in terms of your reputation.

4. Build and Expand Your Influence

Facebook and Twitter are two of the world’s most popular social media platforms, and creating consistent quality content on these platforms can help you establish brand awareness. Creating great content on your blog or on a high-profile website and utilizing the right keywords will also increase your visibility and influence, helping you reach the top of the search results. Every piece of valuable content you create will help to strengthen your domain authority and online reputation.

When created strategically, content can help build authority. Build a reputation as a thought leader in your industry, and strengthen the reputation. When you post content, connect with the people who post comments. If you do so, you can maintain a lasting relationship with your audience that can be beneficial for your business in the longer run.

To get an idea of what people are saying, do a regular search for the brand name of your product. When you’re on social media, people expect you to be sociable, so remember to connect with them and be active. When customers contact you on social media, they expect you to respond quickly to inquiries.

Always remember that as important as it is to reply to the positive comments, it is equally important to address the audiences’ concerns and solve the growing issues they have with your product. There are times when acknowledging a problem is not enough. You have to do something about it so that your credibility stays intact and you are loved and recognized by everyone.

If you are able to respond to problems, you can gain valuable insights into consumer sentiment about a brand. However, if you can’t solve it immediately, you won’t be recognized on social media, which can cause problems for your brand.

With online reputation management, you can help steer conversations around your brand in a positive direction on social media so that negative feelings can be acknowledged and managed. Show that you are listening to how they react and the products and services they are interested in. Instead of fearing negative reviews or pretending they don’t exist, take a proactive approach to online reviews. Always respond with a solution, as silence only makes matters worse.

The best online reputation management strategy is to respond well to what people say about your brand, products, and services. There are now various software tools that allow you to manage social media accounts and respond to authentic customer reviews while giving you access to the most up-to-date information about your customer base and preferences.

Focus your efforts on the one or two places you enjoy the most and use them to build relationships with your audiences. Connect with like-minded people, share your thoughts and expertise, update your job search, follow industry blogs, become a regular guest on forums, connect with others, and share ideas. It could easily become a full-time job for you, and your employees to really engage with your customers, and partners on all your social media platforms

5. Protect Yourself From Negative SEO

Take action to keep your score high and increase your positive connections higher up the leader board. Negative SEO is typically the result of a competitor or hacker who intentionally tries to lower your search engine rankings with malicious intent. There might be numerous links that may spam your website. These links are linked to your site to lower the target audience. They are an unavoidable part of negative SEO. Be aware that someone might create many poor-quality links to your site. This can damage your ability to rank higher in any search engine.

There are numerous SEO tools online that allow you to check your search results by looking at the top 10 search results on Google. There are many tools at your disposal that can help check if your backlinks are authentic or not. Tools like Google’s search engine optimization toolkit and Google Analytics are the most authentic that can help you rank your website higher up the ladder.

These tools will provide you with metrics that show how valuable a link is. They will also give you an insight so to what can be done to eradicate the excessive backlinks that are harming your website’s credibility. Poor quality backlinks have warning signs, so you can check them and decide which ones to remove. This will tell Google that you do not want certain links to be taken into account when evaluating your site. One of the most effective ways to do this is to send a request to the webmaster of your website to remove a particular link.

Brand Management Solutions

We hope you found these tips helpful in protecting and improving the reputation of your business online. Universal Creative Solutions understands that monitoring and managing your online presence and brand is a constant challenge.

Therefore, we provide solutions to combat them effectively to help you build a positive image for your brand. Of course, we always say that you should do your research before purchasing, but with us, we can assure you that you’re with the right people.

Contact us for a free consultation and see your website soar high on the search engines and pave the way to business success.