Online Reputation Management Tips For Small Businesses
Almost every business irrespective of its location has an issue with a customer. This situation should be dealt quickly and amicably. Otherwise, it may end up with the customer posting in a public forum. The agitated customer may feel that they need to issue a warning to people about your business. News can travel faster now in this age of the internet. Negative words can have an adverse impact on your business. However, if you have prepared to handle online criticism of your company, then you may be able to tackle effectively and minimize the financial impact. Let us discuss some tips for your online reputation management.
Create a presence on media sites
Your company should be present on some social media platforms. However, if you are in a highly competitive market, you may need to be active on some other social media sites as well. There are numerous such sites available and some of them specific to your business. For many high-tech companies, integration with LinkedIn may be helpful.
Strengthen your influence on social media accounts
You need to increase your influence on the various social media accounts. Just having a Facebook, Twitter and Google+ account is not sufficient. Building your audience for them is important too. You can make your social media accounts to interact with your customers. If someone starts to post negative things about your business, then these accounts should be strong enough to outrank these negative postings.
Consider your brands
You may require building social profiles for your product names and brands. Develop contents to rank for those names. Maybe to reserve each brand name, you may need to develop web pages, websites and social media profiles.
Protect individuals associated with the company
A solid reputation management strategy is essential for the founders, owners, and executives who are distinctive. Very often, customers search by names for doctors, dentists, lawyers, so it is necessary to protect these individuals associated with the business.
Implement authorship
You can implement authorship as a marketing strategy. This is helpful for businesses where owners are closely related to the identity of the business. The author tag is associated with individuals and not a business page.
Blog
Blogging not only helps in improving site’s rankings on good keywords, but for reputation purposes, it ranks for your name, and you can respond to any assertions made about your organization.
Do not be inflexible
When you are responding to negative reviews, you may want to give your process a serious thought. It is worth investigating whether there may be some weaknesses that need to be addressed. Especially if you have been receiving negative feedback frequently about a particular thing, then you should come up with a solution without going into any conflict with the customers.
Conclusion
Investing in proactive online reputation management services is a good decision by small businesses in the long run, especially if such a crisis crops up. If you do not have time to handle this or you do not how to tackle this, have someone handle it for you.