Social Media and Managing Your Online Brand and Reputation

Social media is an important tool for business communications.  Despite the positive aspects it brings, the nature of social media means that someone airing their bad experience online does so, instantly and potentially to a massive audience.

As the online environment becomes more crucial to business, and more people are continuously online, increasingly they will comment on their experience with friends via Facebook, blogs, Twitter and so on.  This emerges as a risk that all businesses need to manage.  Any negative comments from disgruntled customers (or employees) can potentially be very damaging to a business image if it goes ‘viral’.

Here are 3 steps for SMEs to be proactive in managing their brand and reputation:

1. Audit

This is essential to assess your brand and reputation and see exactly what people think about your business.  These conversations are happening with or without your presence so there is plenty of information out there.  Therefore it is vital for business to be a part of the online community and monitor what is being said about them.

2. Positive Content

It is unlikely that you will be able to have every negative comment or image removed from its original source.  Content which is hosted on a third’s party’s site is content that will be challenging to remove.  If you have been unsuccessful in asking nicely to have it removed, be proactive and keep publishing constructive content.  This can diminish the negative content’s visibility to the lower end of an engine search.

3. Track & Monitor

Think about key words or phrases that you believe symbolise you, your company, and your brand.  These can be typed into a search engine to see what comes up.  Better still, to be more efficient set up ‘alerts’ (i.e Google Alert) with your key words so that you are notified each time there is a post or tweet that mentions your key words.

Be cautious about trying to have negative comments removed as this may cause more damage as it alerts individuals to the content and suggests you are trying to hide something!!  Accept that the online environment is something you can’t control and that negative comments will always be part of equation.  Business can only track, monitor, negate and correct factual information.

Thanks for reading!

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Tags: Brand Reputation • Online Content • Online Reputation • social Media • Social Media Sites • social media tips