A Comprehensive Introduction To Online Reputation Management
What is ORM?
Online Reputation Management (ORM) refers to the act of influencing and controlling a brand’s reputation on the internet. Your online reputation dictates how others perceive your business when they search for it or come across it accidentally. Thus ORM has been used by many in order to proactively influence the information that people may find online about you.
How to Utilize ORM?
Building and managing your online reputation means actively influencing the impression that your business leaves on users. This could be done by using various tools and strategies that can help you manage and maintain a positive brand reputation. The first step toward a good reputation is deciding how you want your business to be perceived. Secondly, is assess your current standing and status online. What do people already think about you? What do they say online about you? This is called monitoring your online presence.
Following this, you can start by designing a social media content strategy to promote your desired reputation. A social media content strategy outlines what your business or brand wants to focus on, the use of keywords and media types (articles, videos, podcasts).The first step in creating a strategy is to define your social media goals. Do you want to win more fans or followers? Increase sales in your ecommerce store? Raise awareness of your brand?
It is also important to decide which relevant social platforms will help you reach your customers better and eventually attain your desired goals. Pages and profiles on social media are an extension of your brand and create additional platforms for people to interact and voice their opinions.
On here, constant communication and engagement with your audience is crucial. Respect your audience and encourage your followers to engage with your content. Respond to questions, comments and positive as well as negative feedback in a timely manner.
You can also monitor how well your strategy is being implemented by using platform specific tools that can help you gain demographic insights about your audience and competitors. Apart from insights on followers, you can see the performance of your posts, stories, and ads, as well as your profile in general.
How Important is SEO for ORM?
However, ORM is not only about managing negative and positive feedback, but also managing content in search engines. Comprehensive keyword research and high-quality content increase your chances to push undesirable content further down on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Creating your media, i.e. blogs or websites that promote your brand in a positive manner will enhance your online reputation.
Using relevant keyword will help you learn the exact queries people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for online. Consequently, using the right keywords in your content will promote you closer to the top of your target market. Google holds by far the biggest market share, so you can make good use of its tools to manage your brand online.
Paid media is another digital marketing tool that can enhance your online performance. That involves advertising with Google AdWords, display ads on social media, and sponsored posts on influencing blogs. Paid media extends your reach and drives more traffic to your websites by building new relationships with partners and customers.
To conclude, paid media, your own created content, and most importantly, social media are essential digital marketing channels that help built your online reputation. Particularly, social media possesses many available and accessible tools to help accomplish daily tasks such as content creation and staying on a publishing schedule.
What do you think? What are you doing to stand out from your competition in a positive manner? How are you using social media to enhance and improve your online brand reputation?