image credit to dreamsystemsmedia.com
As any business owner knows, reputation is what really makes a business. You just won’t stay on top for long if no one is happy with your products or services. Online, this is even more certain. You’ll find that there are so many sites where you can post poor reviews that it can be devastating to your business if someone decides to trash you online.
Fortunately, there is online reputation management. Essentially, you keep track of what people are saying about you and make sure that there is more positive than negative in the search results. While you can use something like Google Alerts to find out who is talking about your company, a good old fashioned search will also turn up plenty of information on what people are finding if they do a search on your company name. We often check for keywords, but when was the last time you looked up your actual company name?
With social media, you can help recover some of the rankings. There are two main ways to accomplish this:
Replace it with social media. This is the first method where you would use your company name in tweets or other public forums. Since Google loves these instant update, it will likely pick them up faster and they will rank ahead of the poor reviews, particularly if the review wasn’t at the top of the page, anyway.
Be sure to include your keywords and the name of your business. In many cases, you will want to include the name of the main business owner, as well, which may well be your own name. This is because some people will look for the business, others will look for your name, instead, it really depends on how they know you.
Create links for existing pages. If you have a website and articles or other smaller sites spread out around the internet, you can use social media to build these up so they rank higher than poor reviews or unhappy blog posts about you.
Don’t worry, even if you don’t have a huge web presence, social media can be used, along with bookmarking, to bump positive reviews up to the top positions in Google, effectively knocking any unpleasantness off the front page or two. It does take some work, but this is why you need to be very aware of what is going on and what people are saying about you, as you can start fixing things as soon as it happens.
Online reputation management is a great use for social media, particularly if you already have a good following.
One of the areas that many business owners don’t think much about is their online reputation. Everything we do online contributes to this, but there are a few other factors, as well.
