Managing Your Reputation: What You Should Know

The reputation that your business has can make or break a business. All it takes is one comment online that can go viral. The internet has made it easier than ever to make unfounded an often untrue accusations about businesses and the people who own them. Here are some things that you may want to consider doing to protect the reputation of your business.

To help build your company’s reputation, you need to claim your name. The name of your company or your product is essential to brand recognition. There are several websites that allow you to check your product’s or company’s name to ensure that it is not used by someone else.

Before putting too much effort in reputation management online, check to see how much you need, if any. Search your business with Google and Bing. Do negative results come up? Do the websites and blogs your business runs only show up on a few hits or none at all? Answering yes to either question means that you have work cut out.

Posting information on social media sites is important to your business’s reputation. You should post several times a week at the very least to effectively run a marketing campaign. If you find that posting on social media sites is overwhelming, consider hiring an assistant to make your posts for you.

The best way to manage your reputation is simply to provide great customer service to everyone that you deal with. When everyone is happy, they only say positive things or just nothing at all. Word of mouth is the most powerful advertising because it is free and unstoppable. Make sure no one ever has a reason to bad mouth you in the first place.

Maintain your good reputation by satisfying an unhappy customer. Turning negative experiences into good ones can show customers that you do care. If the information is available online, it increases the audience of those who know you are willing to rectify a situation. Potential customers can see your efforts and will want to work with you.

Make sure that at least several of your business web pages are optimized for your business name. You want Google to recognize your business homepage as the authoritative Internet site about your business. You want to have the number one search position for your business name, not number two or three behind a Wikipedia article or some blog. Make sure that your website is the first listing someone sees when they Google your brand.

Post moderation guidelines on each of your websites and social media sites. By posting guidelines, your visitors will know what is and what is not acceptable responses on your website and social media sites. If someone posts something that is not within the guidelines, remove the post and give an explanation of why the post was removed.

As you can see, a reputation can either build a business up or it can bring it down. That is why it is more important than ever to manage the reputation that your business has. So keep the above tips in mind and help protect the reputation of your business.