Protecting your digital reputation should be a priority, regardless of what industry you happen to be operating in. Without your online reputation you are nothing. But you need to go out of your way to both monitor and react to the changing situation. This guide is going to show you the issues you have to take into account when protecting your online reputation.
Know Your Reputation
First of all, you have to know your reputation to begin with. Start by searching for the name of your company, your founder, and your products on Google. This will bring up anything and everything people have said about you. If you haven’t been keeping track of your reviews, this will inform you about exactly what people think of you.
Monitoring as You Go
Once you know what people think of you, set up a Google Alerts trigger for each of the terms you just searched for. This will mean that whenever anyone mentions anything about you online you will receive an email in your inbox.
Avoid Anything Controversial
Sometimes controversy can work out for the best, but anything you post could be killing your business. The majority of people, though, will find themselves in a desperate situation if they try anything of the sort. It’s not worth the hit to your online reputation to attempt to do anything controversial.
Keep your content relatively tame.
Deliver on Your Promises
Businesses, especially startups, are known for trying to promise the earth. When they can’t deliver on their promises, people start to talk about them in a negative light, and 97% of people read online reviews. Go out of your way to make sure that this doesn’t happen by being realistic whenever you make a promise
Don’t promise something you can’t deliver on.
Produce Quality Content
Online reputations can be destroyed simply by posting the wrong type of content in the first place. Is your content marketing generic? Is it just designed to act on the principle of clickbait? You are going to annoy your target audience, and you won’t rank high when it comes to SEO.
Quality content should have a firm purpose in mind and it should be rich. Long form content tends to work best for this purpose.
Have Social Media Policies in Place
It does matter what your employees post on their social media accounts. Make no mistake that if an employee goes out of their way to post something controversial or extreme it could destroy your company. This is why companies have taken to adding social media policies that all employees are expected to follow, even during their downtime.
Never Post When Frustrated
If something goes wrong, such as a bad customer decides to make trouble, it’s tempting to post out of frustration. This is a mistake and it will lead to problems. You need to make sure that you are always posting with a clear head. If you are angry or frustrated, stay away from social media.
It’s a good idea to invest in social media scheduling for this reason. By writing out your statuses days in advance, you are giving yourself the chance to think about what you are saying.
Track Your Social Media Manager
When you hire a social media manager they can take away the strain of having to worry about posting regularly to your social media channels and generating a following. But that doesn’t mean they should be allowed total control over your social media image.
Companies have run into trouble before because their social media manager made a mistake and it wasn’t discovered until significantly later.
Unify Your Brand
If you have different voices on your different social media channels, customers are going to spot inconsistencies and they are going to be confused by what you are posting. Make sure that you are unifying your brand by creating a single persona and extending that persona across all social media.
Hire the Professionals
Finally, sometimes you need to repair damage that has already been caused. Most companies don’t have the expertise to do this in-house. This is where you can hire a professional online reputation management company. A whole industry has grown around this need.
Organizations have discovered significant advantages to employing people in this capacity. It has enabled them to take much of the stress and strain away.
Last Word
Protecting your online reputation is as much about being careful about what you post as it is about tracking your reputation in the first place. How will you protect your online reputation?
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