Monitoring your online reputation is vital for your business success. Not giving proper attention to this, can cost you traffic and eventually, sales. In today’s world, anyone can write a review, good or bad, on social media, websites or forums. When this happens, you should be the first one to know about this. In this article, I will share some tips and tools that will help you keep a clean reputation online.
Treat your customers with respect
The last thing you would want is to get negative reviews about your website or business, all over the internet. To prevent this, you have to respect your clients and never argue with them. Approach all online interactions in a very polite manner. If any of your customers is unhappy by the quality of your services or the products you are selling, offer them a full refund. You never know who your client is, and where he might write a complain about you.
If you are stubborn, you might lose hundreds of potential clients. It happens to a lot of companies managed by careless CEO’s.
Do not post silly messages on social media
Social Media can be a great place to build your reputation, but all your hard work can be ruined in seconds. Check what Chrysler Autos tweeted a few years ago.
The person responsible with the Twitter account worked for New Media Strategies, and he was fired. Chrysler immediately apologized, but a lot of people have seen that message. Such a message would have been worse for a smaller company’s reputation.
Always make sure that the person to whom you give your social media accounts credentials is a person you can trust.
Ignore trolls and excessively negative reviews
If you have been in the online marketing business for a while, you know that it’s impossible not to stumble across trolls. The best advice would be to ignore them, because they have more free time than you.
When you find an excessively negative review about your website, don’t rush and try to defend your reputation. Instead, try to learn from what people are complaining and try not to repeat those mistakes. Always think twice before you act.
Tools to help you protect your business reputation
As your company grows, it becomes harder and harder to do everything by yourself, and this is why you have to use tools. Thankfully, there are many available. Without further ado, here are the best tools to use to keep your reputation intact.
1. Setup Google Alerts
If you haven’t yet created an alert for your company’s name, go to Google Alerts and create one right now. A lot of people will mention your company’s name on websites and social media, and you should know this ahead of time so you can check whether it’s a positive or negative context.
You can choose to get an alert when your brand name, or company’s slogan is mentioned. Here are some examples I use:
- My Company
- MyCompany
- Mycompany.com
- Our slogan on My Company
Choose how often you want to receive these emails, and that’s all.
2. Get alerts when a website links to you
To keep a clean reputation, you will have to verify what websites are linking to you. If you ignore this, you might end up with porn and irrelevant websites linking to your website. This will hurt your reputation, and also your search engine rankings.
To get email alerts when somebody links to your website, you can use Monitor Backlinks. Create an account and connect your website with your Google Analytics account. It will take about 2 minutes to complete this process, and you will automatically get email reports when a website links to you. This is an email sample I just received for my website:
3. Check the influencers who mentioned your company’s name
If Google alerts is not the right tool for you, and you need more detailed reports,.
Search for you name, and click on “Influencers” to see the most important persons that have referred to your brand on Twitter. Add your brand name, and click on “Influencers”.
4. Check your grammar
Double check every article or message you share on social media. Users will find consistent grammatical errors annoying. Don’t feed the trolls. Use tools like Grammarly to verify your articles.
There are companies that ask for thousands of dollars per month for reputation management, but most businesses can take care of this by their own. With the advice and tools I have mentioned; you should be able to keep your reputation clean, for any small or medium businesses.
Felix is a young entrepreneur who loves to write about online businesses and internet marketing.
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