8 Effective Tips for Successful Online Reputation Management

Successful online reputation management (ORM) is a lot more than just social media monitoring or traditional public relations (PR) management. With the growing popularity of social media platforms, messaging apps, blogs, third-party review sites, video platforms, forums, etc., maintaining a solid online reputation is more important than ever for continued success. Today, ORM is considered important even for businesses that don’t sell products or offer services on the Internet.  Here in this post, we will shed light on the top eight tips for successful ORM:

1. Track Popular Platforms

Keep track of what people are writing about your company, products, services, high-profile employees, and the management on popular platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Yelp, Foursquare, Yellowpages, etc. You can use tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Trackur, Reputology, Chatmeter, SimilarWeb, GatherUp, etc to save time and effort.

You can manually perform custom searches for your brand’s name on Google, but you will only get a handful of relevant results at best. It’s exhausting and time-consuming as well.

You should take note of both positive and negative comments, feedback, and reviews.

If a large number of people post similar complaints or negative reviews during a period of time, make sure to address the underlying causes right away.

2. Encourage Happy Customers to Leave a Review

Business organizations that do not encourage happy customers to leave a review on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other such platforms, put themselves at a disadvantage because people have a greater tendency to complain than compliment a good product or service.

It is not difficult to get happy customers or clients to write online reviews but it does require some nudging.

Encouraging happy customers to leave a review is especially important to boost online reputation if your company responds publicly to negative reviews to demonstrate it cares about customer feedback.

Make sure to provide the easiest and quickest route possible to your favorite review site.  Businesses typically will place links to popular review sites on their website. You can typically find Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook and other sites listed in the social media section of a business website. Make sure this is centered in a place on your website where you can easily refer your satisfied customers to leave you positive reviews.

3. Respond to Customers’ Appreciation or Grievances at the Earliest

When customers post a note of appreciation or express dissatisfaction regarding your products or services, try to respond at the earliest. Your customers expect you to do that.

Even if you are not prepared to provide detailed answers to their queries or address their concerns immediately, you can always drop a quick line such as:

• We are looking into it.
• Please email us your order ID. We will investigate it promptly.
• Thanks for your feedback. We have advised our team to address this issue.
• Thank you for your review!
• We are aware of this issue; it will be resolved soon.

Ignoring negative reviews can make the matters worse. If a company does not acknowledge a consumer’s feelings, he will vent his frustration elsewhere. Respond to a negative review just once or twice. Do not get caught up in a lengthy conversation. You can ask them to contact you via phone, email or DM (direct message). How you respond to a negative review can have a positive impact on your audience.

4. Be Active on Social Media Platforms

Merely having a profile, page or account on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram will not help improve or manage online reputation. Trying to keep a low profile by avoiding such mediums will only make it easier for a disgruntled employee, dissatisfied customer, or competitor to tarnish your company’s online reputation with as little as one negative post.

After having developed a social media marketing strategy, you need to disseminate interesting and useful content in various formats such as pictures, videos, blog links, and text through your social media handles and work towards developing an organic following.

First, prospective customers are likely to perceive a brand more positively if it’s active on social media platforms. Second, people are more likely to trust a brand with a significant number of followers on social media even if they have read anything negative about your products or services on the web. Third, successful social media marketing campaigns can also have a positive impact on search engine optimization (SEO) when coordinated with the right SEO services company.

5. Be a Great Social Listener

Besides creating and sharing great content on social media platforms, it is equally important to be a ‘social listener.’

You can, for instance, keep track of social media posts, comments, etc. about your company. This will enable you to take action each time a good or bad comment is posted.

Focus on social media platforms where your target audience is most active. For instance, a news publisher may need to keep track of its reputation on Twitter while a cosmetics company may focus on Instagram.

6. Flag Inappropriate Reviews

Many review sites allow you to flag inappropriate and fake reviews.

If a review contains profanity, is unrelated to your products and services, or is posted by someone who is not your customer, you can flag or report it.

7. Use Influencer Marketing to Boost Your Online Reputation

Influencer marketing lends credibility to your brand. After all, influencers have a great online reputation. Your audience may not trust you or your brand right away but they tend to trust influencers. Influencer marketing also allows for cross-promotion.

Here are some examples of how to use influencer marketing to boost online reputation:

• Have a popular fashion blogger write an article about your product
• Have Instagram users with millions of followers post pictures of them using your products
• Have a food blogger or YouTuber shoot a video at your restaurant
• Have an industry expert or domain specialist make an appearance in an informative video
• Have an industry expert mention your brand in one of his articles on LinkedIn

8. Publish Great Content Online

Your target audience will judge your brand and offerings according to the nature of the content you publish online in various formats.

For instance, if a business publishes informative, useful, and engaging blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, illustrations, etc. on the web, the target audience will start perceiving it as an authority on the subject or an entity that cares about product/service quality and customers.