How to Manage Your Reputation Online

In just a few years, the nature of the web has changed drastically. Gone are the days of static web pages that are passively consumed by visitors. Now, the internet is dynamic and, to a certain extent, user-generated. Anyone can buy a domain, start a blog and publish almost whatever content they want. In this media landscape it’s more important than ever to actively manage your reputation. Not only does it help customer service and brand awareness, it’s also vital in keeping your customers engaged.

Look at it this way: 72% of consumers use social media to engage with brands, and pretty much everyone, including 95% of millennials, expects your company to have at least a Facebook page. In this piece we’ll go over how to find and track people talking about you and how to manage your reputation online.

Find Out What People are Saying & Where

Step one in online reputation management is finding where and when people are talking about you. Ideally, you should be able to search for your brand on Google and see your homepage, social media pages, reviews and mentions, in that order. If your brand is on Twitter (and it should be), use the new Dashboard custom feed to find people talking about you. Custom feeds do more than just alert you to mentions — it finds any tweet that mentions a specified keyword or phrase.

When you set up your custom feed, your name and @username are automatically included in your custom feed, but also include any of your brand names, product names and hashtags that are relevant to your business, and add negative keywords to filter out anything that’s irrelevant. Setting up your custom feed this way will make sure you’re not missing out on any part of the conversation.

You can go back and add or remove any keywords as your business grows and changes.

Monitor mentions of your business on the web using Buzzsumo to find content that talks about your company, brands, products or people. Once you’ve identified influencers in your niche, set up specific alerts to notify you whenever they mention your brand or products. If you’re an international or multilingual site, like WooRank, create alerts for each language you operate in. There’s a chance your Spanish-speaking customers aren’t talking about you in the same way as your English-speaking customers.

Finally, set up Google Alerts for your company. What’s great about Alerts is that when you set them up, it will give you a preview right away. So you’ll not only see what people are saying going forward, but you’ll immediately find what people have already said about you. This can be very valuable since it will give you some history and context surrounding what people are saying about you.

Remember, when setting up your alerts, don’t limit them to "Only the best results". Depending on how many mentions you usually get, this could really limit the scope of your research. The same goes for how often you receive your mentions. If you get mentioned a lot, it might be best to receive alerts at most, once a day, if only for the sake of your inbox.

Keep Up to Date on Reviews

Business reviews are an important part of local SEO and off page SEO. Reviews act as powerful citations and give your business the chance to piggyback on review site’s ranking power. Putting your name and website URL on Yelp could get it to rank for keywords you otherwise wouldn’t be able to compete on. They’re also an important aspect of the conversion process: 80% of online shoppers trust reviews they read online as much as they do personal recommendations. So it’s really important that you encourage your customers to leave reviews.

Of course, since reviews play such a big role in brand awareness, your top priority is to make sure they’re positive reviews. Obviously, the best way to get positive reviews is to provide high-quality products and services. Assuming you do that, the best way to encourage positive reviews is to make leaving reviews as easy for your customers as possible. To this end, add a link to your business’ profile in these places:

• A call to action or Yelp badge on your website. This can be on the home page, product page or in the navigation footer of the site.
• Your email signature. This includes both your personal email address as well as the email account you use to send automated messages like order confirmations.
• If you’ve got a brick-and-mortar store, put a sign in your window and next to your point of sale. If you’ve got a business card that you add to your customers’ bags after purchase, solicit Yelp reviews there as well.

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by Maria Lopez via SitePoint