Since everyone has the ability to write reviews or comments on social medial sites, the potential for misinformation about describing a company’s products or services can be quite high. These inaccuracies have the potential to harm the reputation of a business; especially in situations where online visibility is heavily relied on to attract the interest of customers.
Here are several steps that might be taken to help protect and monitor a businesses reputation:
1) Having a basic knowledge of the social media services is very helpful. By learning the basics of YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. you can get an idea of how users interact and use these sites. Once you have a basic appreciation of how people interact with the social media sites it will be a far-sight easier to monitor comments that might relate to your own business or brand.
2) You shouldn’t assume the social media sites aren’t likely to impact your business. Since there are literally millions of users on the social sites, including very influential public figures, columnists, and bloggers, you really want to know whether these people are talking about your business and whether the comments might be positive or negative.
3) Take the necessary steps to protect your brand name. It will be highly beneficial if you are able to be proactive and register the business name on the various social platforms, which is highly desirable since this will help to stop other people hijacking the brand for what could be undesirable reasons.
4) Establish a set of guidelines for using the social media platforms. A highly effective strategy that is needed to make sure the online reputation of a business is protected is to ensure that strict guidelines are in place in relation to using the social media sites. This might relate to the type of comments that are acceptable. It might also benefit to point out the type of discussions that shouldn’t be discussed on the company’s official social media pages.
5) Making certain to monitor the social media platforms as a daily activity. You really want to stay up-to-date with what is being mentioned on the social platforms, and it will be highly beneficial if you are able to monitor what is being said; whether negative or positive.
6) Engaging with the audience. If you find that you’ve attracted some negative comments on the social sites, you might wish to engage in a dialogue to discuss the situation in public in the hope of reaching a successful conclusion. This is often able to help give a business a high level of credibility with the target audience.
7) Use the services of the experts. If you aren’t up to dealing with the work required with monitoring and repairing the issues causing damage to your online business reputation it might be best to use the services of the skilled and knowledgeable online reputation consultants, you might wish to click here to learn about the full range of services provided.
Beyond the ability to manually search on Twitter or Facebook for comments relating to your business, you might well find that there are a variety of automated tools which can be highly effective for speeding up the process of monitoring comments that might relate to your company name. You have choices like Google Alerts and Technorati which are highly effective at giving alerts should the business name receive comments on the social platforms or blogs in general.
Author Bio
Dan Thomas is highly involved in creating the very best in content strategies for promoting websites and providing online reputation services, and you can click here for more details.
