Social Media, Your Website

2 Steps To Managing Your Online Reputation

How to you manage your online reputation when your customers are speaking about you and everyone is listening? There are two important steps that can help you manage your online reputation that can ultimately increase customer service and avoid any negative news to be spread around the Internet.

1. Monitor

Try to see your business through the eyes of your customer. If you were your customer and did a Google search on your business’s name, what would you find? Would you find poor customer reviews or a recently updated blog or website with relevant content that is valuable to your customers? Knowing what is already online about your business and then continuing to monitor what is online is the first step.

Google Alerts is a great way to stay up to date on any mention or posting with your business name included. Setting aside a little bit of time each day to review this information can greatly increase the number of happy clients and having your customers feel valued.

2. Manage

So once you have started creating conversations with your customers and clients, what do you do?

First, don’t be tempted to post false reviews to outweigh any negatives that may appear online. If your business is found to be partaking in this practice, it is inevitable that you will be exposed, causing more trouble than good.

Second, you don’t need to respond to every review and comment and be sure that if any of those make you angry, step away from the computer and do not post anything! A better way to deal with this situation would be to send a message directly to the customer that is unhappy or upset, apologize (Remember the customer is always right!) and then see what can be done to make the situation right for them.

Third, look for reoccurring complaints, this will alert you to problems that you may not even be aware that exist with your business and will give you the opportunity to correct them and see more positive reviews in the near future!