Social Media's Role In Reputation Management

It hasn’t escaped the attention of the savvy business that online reputation management is becoming more and more important pretty much by the day. With almost everyone now turning to the Internet before making any real spending decisions, it’s hardly surprising that what’s said about you and your brand online counts for more now than largely any other form of feedback. There were once only select service industries that were dependent on positive online feedback – the same now extends to every business and service across the board. But here’s the real kicker – a full 23% of people admit that they will take to the web to say bad things about a brand if need be, but less than 10% will sing the brand’s praises when absolutely delighted with their services or products. As such, the vast majority of online feedback has the potential to be negative and paint a picture of a brand that’s neither balanced nor fair – especially where everyday social network gossip is concerned.

This makes it hugely important to tap into the power of social media for positive reputation management and promotion – here are a few tips from the pros on how to go about this:

Optimize Social Media Pages

If and when it gets to the point that entering your brand name or other keywords returns a list of results where several are negative, you’re in trouble. The last thing you want is for the first thing people to see about your brand to be negative comments and reviews in Google. In order to prevent or treat this, optimize your social media pages and create more pages to optimize, in order to get these higher in the rankings and push the negative feedback further down while you go about addressing it.

Choose Social Media Carefully

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the world of social media begins and ends with Facebook. Not only is this not the case, but Facebook might not be the best platform for you to choose – not even close. Take into account the various platforms out there in accordance with the target market you’re trying to reach, in order to tailor your decision accordingly. The power of Pinterest and LinkedIn for example cannot be overstated for a great many business areas.

When You Find Praise, Run With It!

Without getting carried away and coming across as desperate, it’s never a bad idea to spread the good word about you and your brand every time something positive is said about you. If you happen to find some really glowing feedback in a dark corner somewhere that most folk won’t come across, bring it to light on either your primary page or via social media. Likewise, be sure to draw further attention to any glowing praise you receive by responding to it or leaving your own comment thanking the reviewer. In addition, don’t ever be worried to reach out to your target market and actually ask them to leave you a positive review. Assuming of course you haven’t let yourself down and did a great job living up to expectations, some will be more than happy to do so.

Embrace the Criticism

It might not appear so on the surface, but negative criticism can actually be better for your business over the long-term. Not only does it show you where you need to improve, but you can turn any negative into a positive by following it up and responding to it in order to win over the part responsible party and anyone else coming across it.

Listen and Learn

And finally, the most important thing of all to take away from social media in terms of reputation management is constructive feedback as to where you’re going wrong and what is going down well with the punters. Don’t weigh up what you read against your own biased views of the business, take them as the most valuable insights you will ever have as to how you can better your operations.

Author Bio
Rocky John Tayaban, for the past 8 years, has been helping small and large companies all over the world in their online marketing. At the moment, Rocky is the managing director of iSolutions Media - a search engine marketing firm in the Philippines. Follow him on Twitter @SmartOnlinePros to stay updated on all the latest in social and search.