Online Reputation Management: 5 Tips For A Better Reputation Online
Since digitalization, millions of people can influence the reputation of your company. This has a significant influence on your external image and, in the long term, on your online reputation.
But what exactly is online reputation?
Basically, online reputation means how a company is perceived by others on the Internet. Online reputation is created by the interaction of a wide variety of players on different channels.
On the one hand, individual customers of the company actively contribute to its reputation, for example by writing comments or leaving reviews on different social networks. On the other hand, there are forums and blogs where people exchange views about companies and products. A company’s employees also express themselves on social networks and post photos of the last team event, for example.
Above all, the company itself always communicates its values in all its business activities and through its corporate communications to the outside world. All these factors influence a company’s online reputation and make reputation management increasingly complex.
5 tips to proactively influence your company’s reputation
Don’t be put off by the fact that the big crowd can influence your reputation — the following tips will help you with your successful reputation management.
1. Complaint management: Listen to your customers. Try to take something positive out of criticism and learn from it. Respond to complaints and questions promptly and seriously. By actively collecting feedback and comprehensive monitoring in the communities, you will always know how your reputation is doing — so you can keep an eye on everything!
2. Customer and employee loyalty: Loyal customers and employees are your advertising ambassadors. They defend your company from others and give you a super base with positive reviews.
3. Evaluation marketing: Actively collect reviews from your satisfied customers and present them to the public. The potential customer informs himself and finds reviews and then uses the service.
4. Search engine optimization: Make sure that positive news about your company ranks as high as possible in Google results. Potential customers are looking for you online. Actively influence what they find there.
5. Social media marketing: People are talking about you on social media anyway — give your (potential) customers a place to go for questions, praise or complaints and show that you want to maintain an open dialogue.
Don’t be afraid of fake or negative reviews!
You may be asking yourself: how am I supposed to get a handle on all this as a small company? Or as a large corporation that’s being discussed all over the web. The fact that nowadays everyone expresses their opinion freely on the net and posts reviews still scares some companies. In some industries, fake reviews are also an issue. We can take away these fears to some extent.
Of course, everyone has the right to freely express their opinion. What is important for your reputation is that you notice what is said about you on the web. If you actively monitor, you can also respond to it successfully. Stay up to date on all reviews by being regularly informed by e-mail about new incoming reviews bundled from all review portals. This allows you to react directly in a strategically sensible way.
You can counteract fake reviews by reporting them and, in extreme cases, having them deleted by the platform operator. And what about online bullies? The best way to counter them is to comment respectfully and ask for positive feedback as a balance. You can collect reviews from satisfied customers and give your potential customers an authentic impression of your work. Just meet the naggers with positive voices and good humor for a change.
Don’t be afraid of negative reviews! Of course you want mainly positive reviews, but if you have exclusively positive reviews and consistently 5 stars, you will quickly appear untrustworthy. In a study, it was proven that a total of 4.5 stars inspires more trust than 5 and it was shown that isolated negative reviews enhance the other positive ones and increase trust in the company!
In the end, it’s the good service that counts, not the individual rating. Individual reasonably commented negative reviews can usually not harm your reputation in the long run.
