Tuesday, July 7, 2009

* About Using Social Media For Online Reputation Management

For any company online or offline reputation is very important especially nowadays when people search for reputation of a company before buying any product or service from them. You can't ignore online reputation factor. Even if you are not dealing with online customers then also a bad reputation at any good site can down your business considerably. How you'll understand that your site has bad reputation? Search for your domain name i.e. domainname.com or just domainname at Google, if you find some results from ripoffreport, complaintsboard.com, complaaints.com such sites within top 10 results then you are in trouble. You might have even noticed decrease in sales recently, all due to those results. Smart visitors of your site might have Goggled your business name and might have seen those bad reports. These reports are not always true since those sites don't have much control about complaint poster. Though some of them are fake but it might be eating up your business. In this situation one needs reputation management service.

Which social networks can help me fast?

One of the most influential method of creating reputation is to create profile in the name of your business at sites like myspace, facebook, twitter. There are lots of other social media sites also. Now why sites sites like these? because they allow to create a profile of your business name and you should have a url like twitter.com/domainname.com or just twitter.com/domain. Since these sites have huge reputation and popularity so it's highly likely that with 10-20 incoming links to these urls should bring these sites up in search engines. Search engine like Google always show sites according to their reputation. Since twitter, myspace, facebook kind of sites obviously have greater reputation than sites like ripoffreport.com, complaintsboard.com so those urls will obviously come higher than those bad ones. Your aim should be to push back those bad ones to 3rd pages since it's highly unlikely that your visitor will go through to 3rd page to see your reputation.

Consider these before you think you are doing everything right.

Once you signed up for social site accounts then you have to go through these...

1. Complete your online profile in every possible way you can do it. It's a good practice to put picture and videos of your site to let your visitors know about your company and they realize your site is not just an individual; it's a fully fledged company.

2. Create friends and followers by joining their network or by sending mail or im (instant message). Sometimes online friends/followers can help your site by publishing your company info to their site or to blogs of someone they know.

3. You should work on getting lots of followers by publishing latest industry news or trends. Social network visitors are hungry for new topic or content. When they'll see that your account is getting updated frequently then they'll put your account to their followers list. What's more? You’ll get a juicy link from your follower url like twitter.com/john-doe.

4. Important Observation: You need to build few links for each of your online profile to let search engines know about your profile quickly. 10-20 links for each popular profile should be enough.


If you do these steps correctly as described then you not only should dump all of your bad reputation in pretty fast time but also would open up channel for your site to get more visitors than now from bespoke social media sites.