The online reputation industry has grown alongside the power of word of mouth marketing. With word of mouth marketing boasting a 37% higher customer retention rate, a pristine online reputation could mean big money for your company. In this guide, you are going to learn about the main steps you need to follow in order to effectively monitor your online reputation.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an automatic alert system that will email you whenever your name appears online. You should setup alerts for your company name, brand name, product name and your own name. Whenever something good or bad appears online that mentions any of these queries you will find out about it.
This will help you to keep a handle on what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. Bear in mind that you have a common name you may need to drill down into some more specific queries so you don’t get lots of irrelevant alerts.
Comments On Your Posts
Your blog and anything else under your control, such as your social media networks, will allow customers to comment on your content. Make sure that you automatically receive an alert whenever someone posts something. This is about more than just monitoring whether anyone is posting something negative about you, though.
You need to respond to these comments within 24 hours so you can keep the conversation going. A company that responds to its customers is always going to develop a more positive reputation than its competitors.
Your Google+ Feed
Each day you should check the notifications you have received from your Google+ feed. This doesn’t have to be automatic. You can do this once a day without suffering any negative effects. And if you don’t already have a Google+ account, install one now. It remains an essential part of ranking high on Google+, even if in the social media stakes it can’t hold a candle to the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter
You should also be performing daily checks on your Facebook and Twitter feeds. As mentioned above, you may want to setup automatic alerts for whenever someone leaves a comment on one of your status updates. Responding as quickly as you possibly can will leave a positive impression on your customers and ensure that your online reputation remains in good condition.
Reviews
Each week you should look at platforms like Yelp and Amazon to see what people are saying about you in their customer reviews. There’s nothing much you can do about the reviews people post, but you can make sure that the same problem isn’t popping up time and time again.
Part of protecting your online reputation is about noticing problems early and acting on the feedback you are getting from customers.
Try not to become too invested in any negative reviews you are receiving. It’s a good thing to get some negative feedback because it tells you what you could improve on and it helps to make you look more genuine. There’s nothing more suspicious than a company that has nothing but positive reviews on its feed.
The occasional bad review makes you far more trustworthy.
How Do You Go About Protecting Your Online Reputation
Monitoring how you’re doing is only one part of the process of making sure that people are responding to you in the right way. You need to go further than that and actively improve your online reputation. So what should you do if you have received a slew of negative feedback.
Apologize – To begin with, you may need to apologize for something you have done. Swallow you pride and apologize to a customer publicly if they have had less than a stellar experience working with you.
Examine the Issue – Think about why the issue happened in the first place. Consider whether you could have done something about it or whether that customer simply got the wrong impression of your products and services.
Act – Now you have to turn your company around. It may require sending your customer service team on a training course or making alterations to your online platform. You should always be striving to improve the quality of your service.
Conclusion
Monitoring your online reputation is an essential part of managing your brand image online. But it’s only designed to help you unearth areas where you can improve. Examine the feedback you are receiving and make a conscious effort to improve on it. If you can manage that, there’s no reason why you can’t make sure you have the brand image you deserve.
Contact Us
X