Guide to Online Reputation Management

You will find a lot of misconceptions about online reputation management even amongst the professionals. According to some people, this is all about monitoring the social media channels; however, some other people think this is about public relations, and there is a big crowd who literally has no proper understanding about the impact on sales and business through online reputation. In the digital age, it is actually impossible to protect yourself from any sort of criticism. While it is good to give your audience certain freedom of speech, it is also necessary that you provide them with the perspective of why a particular thing has been defamed.

One of the most modern business commandments is “Be transparent.” Accepting criticism and feedback seems to be helpful for companies that adopt this new communication mode with their customers.

What Exactly is Being Transparent?

• Letting employees talk about products and services candidly.
• Establishing one to one communication flow.
• Valuing for feedback.
• Not hiding critique and addressing it openly.

There are some useful tips you can follow if you want to restore your online reputation.

1. Plan, Pause and Then Respond

It is a wrong idea to react immediately to a certain negative review. There can be some error by your brand, and regardless of what it is, you need to restore your image. This is why you need to take a pause and then plan how to engage in a debatable manner effectively. If required, this will help to mitigate any future damage. If you have a legal team as well as a public relations department, make sure you tell them to engage in similar response that you are doing through the social media. Otherwise, it would be wrong or seem like a double standard response which can call in for more troubles.

2. Acknowledge Your Flaws

This could have been the first point, but we will give your brand the benefit of the doubt. In many instances, brands fail to admit that they have any sort of errors. When the customer or the competitors hold you accountable for any kind of issue, instead of fighting, try to fix it. Addressing your social media reputation should be authentic as well as human; otherwise, the entire procedure might look very insincere.

3. Provide Solutions to Your Flaws as and When Applicable

When pertaining to massive data or statistics, brands tend to make mistakes. Communicating solutions and promoting it in the best possible way can help to restore reputation.

4. Social Media Listening Tools

There are some tools like radian6 or sprinklr, which even though it might be a bit expensive can help you monitor your brand's name when it comes to a global discussion. It also helps to track the audience sentiment towards your brand. So, investing in search tools is going to get you the good result. Your team can do research and study to get ahead of the problem. If you are unable to invest in such social media listening tools, there are options of Google alert, Awario, Tweetdeck, BuzzSumo, Agorapulse, Mention, Hootsuite, SEMrush.

5. More Content

One of the most organic ways to restore the online reputation is to get better ranks on SERP. By creating different content about the brand, this can be a long term effort that assures to get significant results. This also would help to make the content which is not so pleasing about your brand to go down the ladder. Some companies get sponsored content and create online campaigns which would add value to your brand. Sponsored content generally gives an impression of a certain richness about your company.

6. Make the Complaints Offline

Given the social media space, it is a good practice that you take the complaints or similar such suggestions offline so that you can connect with your customers directly. When there is a negative post, message them or email them to find out what exactly bothered them. Dealing with such concerns of your customers privately keeps valuable information such as the credit or debit card numbers private and also keep your negative reputation away from the rest of the public.

7. Speak About Your Brand's Benefit

Once you have brushed away the dust from the negative social media image, look in at the positive sides of your company. Try to tactfully highlight them and develop a campaign which will add value to your existing image and also speak about your company's USP. This helps to create a human touch of your business and also throw some light on the goodness of your brand—eventually, it allows in improving the revenue.

8. Contingency Plan

Restoring the social media image is one of the best ways to take care of a negative issue that once took place. You can meet with the team members of your social media management and Public Relations handle to understand what could be the best way to prevent a similar search situation in the future. It would be wrong not to re-evaluate the contingency response plans.

9. Review Business Functioning

If you find that similar complaints are coming in even after you are doing everything right, apparently you should try to fix it by changing something in the business operations. For instance, you might have the right product but inadequate technical support. It would help if you look out how to improve the post-sale service. In many cases, getting the right brand ambassadors who can connect with your customers is also an effective way to get rid of a negative review.

10. Make Sure That Your Competitors Do Not Bait You

If you have a powerful competitor, they will try to jeopardize your image so make sure that you have proper vigilance to understand there and know if there is any content going around, that would tarnish the image of your brand.

Are You Interested?

Anblik Web Development Company is one of the most reputed names in the digital marketing field. If you are looking for a trendy website designing and development service along with the various aspects of digital marketing, get in touch with the team to get your brand a fair online representation.