5 Tips and Tricks for Effective Online Reputation Monitoring

Every business needs to keep track of its online reputation. It only takes a few hours for a bad customer review to go viral and impact your online presence. It’s even worse if you’re not on top of the situation.

And Here are 5 tips and tricks that you can use to improve your online reputation management:

1. Know What’s Happening With Your Brand

The first step to effective online reputation management is knowing what is being said about your brand. This can be achieved using brand monitoring tools like Mention that can help you holistically manage your business and help you keep on top of your reputation. Another great resource is to set up Google Alerts so you can see what others are posting about you.

Once you know what’s going on, you can take charge and move on to the rest.

2. Keep Your Site and Socials Updated

If you want to show up higher in search results you need to remain relevant to the latest trends by keeping your site socially updated. This means you need to keep your content fresh and fun and pay attention to your social media strategy.

If it’s possible to hire others to help with your content creation, spend some money on it so that you can focus on other more pressing aspects of your business. Just make sure you are putting the most relevant info so that it pushes the rest of the stuff down in the search results.

3. Don’t Respond Immediately to Bad Press

Even though your gut reaction when you are facing a potential PR disaster is to respond immediately when the review drops. But it’s better to step back and wait. While you might need to say something like, "We're looking at that," it's absolutely imperative that you don't be negative or offensive to your reviewer or panic or break down. You should also avoid hiding information. The best course of action when you've determined that something is amiss on your end is to tactfully handle the matter.The best solution once it’s established that something went wrong on your side is to take ownership of the issue in a graceful way.

But till then gather more information before you start responding. Do it fast, and be ready to respond with all the facts as soon as possible.

4. Admit to Your Mistakes and Commit to Fix Them

Always make sure to admit your mistakes when they come to light and do your best to fix them. In many cases, people like to give you second chances if they trust you; this means you can redeem yourself and bring back the trust that you might have lost. Be forthcoming about the mistake, you need not go into details. Apologize and be open with the steps you are taking to fix it. Digging in deeper and denying the problem won’t help–it will only make things worse. Rather accept and apologize graciously.

5. Keep Building Relationships With Your Audience

It’s important to continue building meaningful and long-lasting relationships with your audience. Online reputation management mostly deals with how many people actually believe in your brand and what is being said about you. Create a brand that people love, and you’ll weather any storms. Reach out to your fans and supporters and let them take a stand for you. You’d be surprised at how much that personal touch in your service can help in creating strong bonds with your customers and that will lead to others feeling connected to you and feeling the need to defend you.

All in all, when practicing effective online reputation management, the key to success is speed and being honest to your audience. The faster you respond to customer criticism in a calm and collected way, the more chance you have of resolving the situation with grace. Let it fester and it will become much harder to fix.