Have You Ever Wondered What Other People Think About Your Business?

Your online reputation determines how others perceive your business when they search for it online. As such, it is crucial to understand how much of an impact your online reputation has on your business performance, and how you can actively manage it.

Here comes online reputation management (often abbreviated as ORM) into play. It is a fast-growing discipline which practices the formulation of strategies used to proactively shape or influence the public perception of an organization, individual or other entity on the Internet.

In other words, it helps drive public opinion about a business and its products and services.

Building a reputation used to mostly depend on word of mouth or acquaintances. Prior to the internet, as we know it today, only larger companies with access to substantial advertising budgets had the ability to become household names by promoting themselves in offline media, such as television and newspapers.

Today, digital media has revolutionized exposure and improved access to an individual’s or a company’s profile. Social media platforms have disrupted commerce and the global economy by providing instant access to unfiltered information.

To help manage your online brand reputation, you can make use of various techniques and strategies, which will help you, for instance, push damaging content further down the search engine results pages by ranking your own or third-party more desirable material above it.

However, online reputation management is not only about managing content in search engines; it’s also about managing negative business reviews as well as encouraging and highlighting the positive feedback from customers, creating fresh new content regularly and constantly monitoring your results.

First step into your online reputation management plan would be to decide what is your goal and what do you want your online reputation to be. Following that, you need to assess your current online reputation: What do people already think about you? Does your digital presence match your reputation in your offline network?

After having established a goal for your brand’s reputation and assessing its current status, you can go on to craft a plan that will guide engagement that supports your reputation goals.

An indispensable tool for any business is managing and monitoring their brand on social media platforms. Social media pages and profiles must be seen as an extension of the brand, and used to create additional platforms for people to interact.

Social media represents one of the most important opportunities for digital marketing, as well as managing your content online. To build a solid online reputation, you need to identify the platforms that are relevant for engaging your current and future clients. Be sure to stay consistent and active on all of your accounts, by engaging with your audience in a timely manner.

One way to keep your audience engaged, is to consistently publish original content that provides value. It will in turn lead to higher rankings on search engines and generating additional traffic with high engagement.

Last but not least, the final step is to monitor your results by tracking key social media metrics. This way you can adjust your plan accordingly, and help your brand thrive even more.