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How to Guard and Manage your Online Reputation

Here are quick tips to manage your online reputation and protect your bottom line.


Your professional and business reputation is important.

With the proliferation of the Internet and the growing prevalence of social media it can be difficult to keep track of your online reputation. Here are quick tips to manage your online reputation and protect your bottom line.

 

Reputation Management

As an entrepreneur you should be diligent about maintaining your online reputation. Since you can’t be everywhere at once, use automated tools like Google Alerts and Twitter Search, to identify and search for specific keywords directly related to you and your industry.

Once you receive an alert, good or bad, proactively address it. For example, if an online user posts a negative comment, it can reflect positively on your behalf to address it quickly and politely. If you’d rather not personally address, negative online posts or comments, you can seek out negative content removal services who will do the legwork for you.

Another way to preclude potential problems is to actively and responsibility engage in preferred social media platforms. It is important to note, anything you post online can and will be seen by someone. So if you want to promote your business, and protect your brand image, you should probably think twice about uploading those Vegas photos — and let what happened in Vegas, stay in Vegas.

 

Social Signals Linked to Online Reputation

Another simple way to build your online reputation is through the use of social media. “Social media is a key factor in managing a brand’s online reputation, according to an analysis by MDG Advertising. Research shows that 92 percent of consumers trust the brand recommendations they receive from friends and family, and that 70 percent also value other consumer opinions online,” according to SocialTimes.

If you don’t have a strong social media presence, it offers an effective opportunity to build your online brand. When an online user Google’s your name, they should be greeted with page results boasting good news about you or your business.

Social Media Today explains, “Social signals now play a more prominent role in ranking websites. The study by Searchmetrics showed a strong positive correlation between social signals and better rankings. Social signals have become a more important factor because they can lead to faster indexing of content in search engines. Overall, top ranking URLs had an abundance of likes, shares, tweets, and plus ones. In particular, it is clear that the more plus ones that a URL receives the higher it is ranked in search results.”

Get started by ensuring you have personal and business social media accounts on top sites, like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google Plus. Then, start socializing. If you need additional guidance, professional sites like Reputation.com on Facebook, Socialdraft and Reputation X offer advice and suggestions on how to protect your reputation.

 

DIY Negative Content Removal

Bad press is a potential business reality. From negatively spun articles and negative feedback from customers on Facebook to online trolls commenting on industry forums, most people and their brands will deal with negative online content and comments.

Without the use of professional services, it is not likely you’ll convince a website owner to remove an embarrassing or slanderous comment (without legal force) and if you do, it’s still archived by Google. The best way to make negative content disappear, is to bury it so deep, online users will have to really dedicate time to uncover them.

Start to bury negative online content by replacing it with positive press releases, company blog posts, social media posts, product reviews and more. This will take time and effort on your part. You can start with a simple keyword search of your name or business to view top search results, both positive and negative. If you see an occurrence of your name or business, (i.e. the same keyword associated with something negative) start re-branding that keyword in a positive way.

 

Abigail Clark is a freelance writer. She graduated from The University of South Florida with a bachelors in marketing, minoring in journalism. When she isn’t up to her neck in coupons she is enjoying the outdoors fishing. She loves doing reviews for technology, home products and beauty products. Need a review? Connect with Abigail on Twitter.

 

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