Managing Your Business' Online Reputation with Social Profiles
Social media sites, whether we like it or not, have become an integral part of people’s lives. With the tools they provide, online networking sites allow people to communicate more easily and spread information throughout the Web at a much faster rate than ever before. The fate of many new businesses depends greatly on the success of their online marketing strategies, as consumers now-a-days rely heavily on Google and other search engines to find the goods and services they need. The more you build up your online reputation through social media sites, the easier it will be for people to find your business online. This is because search engines base their results largely on the information provided by reputable social media websites. For this reason, managing your business’s online reputation is an essential task in today’s competitive business environment.
As your business begins attracting customers, some of them, or even your competitors, might put up reviews of your products or services online. Some of these reviews or comments might be negative. In order to prevent any bad reviews from showing up at the top of search engine results for your brand name or business, it’s important to counter them by setting up and maintaining positive social profiles on reputable social media websites.
The main four social media websites on which you definitely must create business profiles are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. The username on your profiles for these websites should match as closely as possible the keyword you are targeting or the name of your company. To check if a username has already been taken, you can go to KnowEm.com. Now, while the aforementioned four social media sites are the must-haves, remember that there are hundreds of social media sites out there, some of which might cater to your particular market niche, in which case you should definitely put up a profile on those sites in addition to the 4 must-haves.
Setting up your profile
Managing your online reputation is about not letting others speak for you. Put out information about your company that you’d like to be known for. This is the whole point of setting up online social media profiles. These profiles should include your company’s history, bios, avatars, logos and comprehensive descriptions of what your business is about. Include as much useful and relevant information as you can, as this will give search engine spiders something to find.
Stay active in your online community
Having a social media profile will do your business reputation no good if you don’t use it. So participate in the online community! This means not just having a profile up, but reaching out to other people (customers, related businesses, etc) and interacting with them. Send and return messages, comment on other people’s profiles, update your company blog regularly, etc. Expanding your network will give you the added plus of internal links coming from these reputable social media sites, which are a huge boost to your search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Monitor
After you’ve set up your profiles and begun building up your online social networks, remember to check up on yourself to see how your business reputation is faring in the online world. Google your business to see how its SERP rankings are doing. Check what other people and companies are saying about you and your business in popular forums and blogs. And be careful about what you put out on the web, as even private emails might someday end up in the public domain, something which could seriously help or damage your reputation depending on the nature of the message. And remember to monitor constantly. This is key if you want to stay on the right track.
This guest post was written by Ryan Frank, an avid blogger and Internet marketing enthusiast living in
