In digital marketing or branding, reputation management is an essential part. This ensures that the company does not face any PR disasters. For this, they need to look at all aspects of it right from reviewing content before posting it on different social media sites to monitoring their accounts to look for negative reviews or any signs of hacking attempts. This means that every brand should have and follow a strategic plan to protect their reputation on social media.
The best way to ensure that the reputation is retained is to respond to every inquiry as promptly as possible. Since social media is a part of the customer service strategy of every brand, such an effort is typical and inevitable. A company will be better off if they use social media to:
- Publicize their brand to the world and
- Showcase how efficiently and quickly they respond to their customers.
Ideally, secondhand reviews only give a snapshot of private communication to potential customers. However, when the same conversation can be accessed and viewed online in its entirety, it provides potential customers a chance to gauge the value of the brand for themselves.
All you have to do is respond quickly and in a courteous manner when any potential or current customer inquires about your products or services on social media. You must put your best foot and face forward in this regard because the entire conversation history of your brand is available to all those people who search for it.
Table of Contents
A common mistake to know and avoid
One of the most common mistakes that social media marketers make and end up facing challenges is publishing unsupervised content. This is something that you should seriously avoid. This can cause serious effects, especially when a large number of employees can access your corporate social accounts.
When a particular member accidentally or intentionally posts an image or any other form of content that reflects poor taste and was meant to be displayed on a personal profile, it will create a negative impact on your business reputation. An incident like this is highly likely to occur if you have a large and distributed social media team. In that case, you will need significant damage control.
There is only one way in which you can prevent such a situation from occurring. This is by regulating the permissions and roles of your social media accounts. For example, Facebook allows you to assign different roles to different employees. This includes:
- The admin
- The editor
- The moderator
- The advertiser and
- The analyst.
All you have to do is go to your Facebook Business Manager page and control who can be permitted to access the account as an owner, a contributor, or an admin. If you want to add another layer of security to your social accounts, you may consider adopting a social media management platform. This platform will protect your data by allowing you to manage your distributed social media teams.
This means that you will ensure that each of the employees has the desired level of access to your social accounts just as required for permitting their specific role, whether it is as an administrator, an editor, or a contributor. This, in simple terms, means that you will be able to prevent your employees from posting any content that may fall outside of corporate norms and guidelines.
The customer service app
You must also make sure that the customer service apps of your company are working as they are supposed to. Since these customized apps are typically connected directly to your social media accounts, it is required that:
- You check the links frequently
- Make sure that there are no issues and
- It is working correctly.
If you find that they are broken, then you should immediately turn them off to fix them as quickly as possible.
In addition to that, you must also look out for any rogue or duplicate pages that may hamper your reputation. Ideally, there are several reasons for which the social accounts of your company may be duplicated. Deliberate hijackers or even employees can do it without knowing the consequences of such an act. These duplicate pages will affect a lot of different ways, such as:
- It will damage your reputation of course
- It will confuse the search engines, and therefore you will not be able to rank higher in the SERP.
Therefore, make sure that you put in some time to search every social media platform for your company name. If you find that there is a duplicate account, you must open it and note down the person or account with whom you are connected. If you cannot find who created the social account, you can take the help of the online help centers as well as a professional ORM Company Florida, to find it as well as the remedies to it, which characteristically are different for each social platform.
Conduct social media audits
To make sure that your social account is free from any issues, you must conduct audits regularly. You will come across several things during auditing including:
- Duplicate pages
- Phishing scams and others.
All these will damage the reputation of your company, which took you years to build.
You must also check your content for any spelling errors, as well as its validity. This will once again save you from going into damage control and missing out on the other opportunities for your business.
Develop a social media policy
Also, develop and follow a social media policy to ensure better results. Make sure that you include all the essential elements in your policy, such as:
- Legal Risks
- Roles
- Confidentiality
- Privacy
- Brand Vision and Voice.
When creating such a policy, you should seek the input of all in your company.
Wrapping it up
To manage your reputation, you must choose your name carefully, stay active to populate your profile, and verify your accounts apart from posting regularly. Also, train your team to monitor activity, respond professionally, and to tell your story.
