Why is online reputation management important?
The benefits of online reputation management can be broken down into four main areas:
- Credibility – When positive reviews are made (and when negative reviews don’t exist), you create positive links directly or indirectly with your brand. The more visibility you have online makes you credible in the eyes of customers, stakeholders, employees, influencers, and peers.
- Trust – With credibility comes trust. When people trust a company, brand, or person, they are more likely to buy from them or make a recommendation.
- Profit – Especially in eCommerce, companies with higher star-ratings, reviews, and positive content and PR get more business.
- Talent – Often overlooked, when you are hiring for new positions, brands with a positive reputation attract better employees.
These four pillars of online reputation should be enough to get you to consider investing into managing your online reputation.
If you don’t have the resource to do this yourself, you might need to find an online reputation manager.
Social media management tools
- Social Pilot: Worth checking out its free trial immediately. You can schedule posts for pretty much every platform and get instant analytics once a post goes live. You can reply to multiple Facebook posts from the dashboard
- Buffer: One of the leaders in social media management with a simple UX. Great for Twitter and Facebook, but the LinkedIn experience is a tad clunky. If GIFs and @ mentions on LinkedIn are your thing, this is not for you.
- Hootsuite: Built for creating social media calendars and campaigns as well as simple posting. You can even work on social posts together.
- Sprout Social: Doubles as a social listening tool so you can grab inspiration for your next social campaign from your competitors and clients.
- Sendible: Accredited partner of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If your business revolves around these three platforms, check it out.
- CoSchedule: Combine your blog calendar, workflows, and social media queues with this one. If you’re looking for an all-in-one marketing calendar, look no further.
- Agora Pulse: Made for those who like flexibility with their posts. Schedule, reschedule, queue, or bulk upload your posts,
- eClincher: Includes a post scheduler, social inbox, content management, monitoring, analytics, and a unique visual calendar.
- MavSocial: For managing, scheduling, and posting, with a focus on automation so you spend less time crafting posts.
- Crowdfire: Inspires your social media schedule by discovering relevant content based on your topics of interest.
Positive social media mentions
Negative social media mentions
The more important side to tracking social media mentions is when someone references your brand in a bad light.
Whether the information is right or wrong, the fact that an article has been written or social media post has been shared is a flag for you (or your online reputation manager) to take action.
Negative social media mentions from individuals
Here’s how to respond to negative social media mentions from individuals:
- If an individual has a problem or technical issue, let them know you’re resolving the problem (and then resolve it). Communication is the most vital part of the process here – even more important than resolving the problem.
- If there is no actual problem to resolve but a customer has had a bad experience, apologise for the bad experience and ask what you can do to remedy the situation.
- When appropriate (and you have the ability to), offer compensation in the form of a freebie, credit, or cash depending on your product.
Negative social media mentions from brands
If you are mentioned (or are alerted of a mention) in a negative post from another brand, chart a different course of action.
- Nudity
- Pornography
- Exploitation
- Medical, financial, or national identification information
- Copyright violation
- Remove results directly from Google
- Remove the content completely via legal actions
- Development and optimization of own branded content to rank higher than the negative content
If Google doesn’t deem your claim to strong enough to remove the content from Google, you must decide whether the content is damaging enough to warrant taking legal action. Here, it’s advisable to consult your legal team rather than your marketing team.
If the content doesn’t warrant legal action, the next best thing to do is to create content that outranks the negative content.
It’s easier said than done sometimes but taking the time to craft a better and more informative blog post that appears ahead of the negative post on Google is the best option.
While you won’t remove the post, you’ll likely pick up more of the traffic for those search terms finding the negative content.