As a brand, your reputation is all you have. Regardless of the value of your assets or your performance over the years, it is integral that you maintain a credible reputation to increase clients’ ability to trust in and engage with your brand. Even if you achieve a significant level of growth throughout this period, a bad reputation could be consequential and lasting. You could be left with a ghost brand on account of a bad reputation. While building a reputation could take years, tearing it down can happen in a matter of minutes. This is why you need reputation management for your brand.
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What is reputation management?
Reputation management revolves around maintaining and influencing opinion about an individual’s or group’s reputation. It is usually focuses on management of search results, and may also include the use of tools such as optimization, mug shot removal and censoring of negative comments. Reputation management will usually revolve around optimization of content on the internet as opposed to social media. However, with the right social media activity, you can maintain a great reputation.
Social media has been billed as a great platform to grow your brand. It promises increased visibility for brands, thanks to the high user activity on the avenue. There are over 3.5 billion active monthly users, which makes up around half of the world’s population. There is also a high level of interest in brands on the platform, which will encourage interaction and provide to sufficient room for expansion. Your social media activity will attract interest from these heavily invested users, which could be channeled into increased revenues and earnings. With an average of over 75% interest in brands on the platform, it is easy to see why social media is appealing to brands.
The potential for better priced marketing services and targeting options available to brands make it even more attractive. You can access targeted advertising products for less than the price of a cup of coffee, with potentially significant benefits. It offers real value for money, with the option of an expense-free marketing platform for brands which are not interested in spending money on social sales. It offers an ideal platform for personal level interaction between brands and potential or actual clients. With the right activity, brands can leverage social media activity to grow their brand. However, they could impact their reputation far quickly than they could build it.
The high level of interest in brand activity and the high user numbers elevate the importance of a good reputation online. These people can see your social media content from the minute you share it, and may begin to form perceptions about your brand. If you are not careful, you could be taken down by a single post! Is social media integral to maintaining a good reputation? It can be. But can social media affect your reputation? It could be even more consequential for your brand than other avenues of marketing, and may not even require significant action on your part.
There are many possible actions that could affect your reputation on social media. You could display negative brand values by failing to respond to your followers in a timely or a problem solving manner. Choosing to respond to certain types of comments and queries could affect user perception about your brand, just as easily as inactive social media activity. You should be wary of using foul language and imagery, regardless of any success by previous campaigns. You could even attract a bad reputation by offering too much in terms of advertisement without sufficient value in terms of quality of content.
Can you use social media to manage your reputation? Even though online reputation management revolves around content that may be accessed on the internet, social media can also be an effective tool. You should keep in mind that your social media activity can only do so much to salvage a damaged reputation, which means you should consider using other reputation management tools as well.
Social media can be the first line of defense for your reputation management efforts. It is very likely the most popular avenue for interaction between your brand and a client, which means you, can leverage it to maintain a great reputation and ensure customer loyalty. Here are a few practices you can take up to ensure great reputation management through social media.
Regular activity
A big draw for social media users to brand is the type and frequency of activity. Dormant social media pages are usually associated with untrustworthy brands, which suggest that your reputation can take a hit if you set up an online presence and fail to interact. This is also true for businesses that are not available online, with clients less likely to trust the brand.
Responsible activity
You do not have to share content just so you can meet your expected activity levels. The internet never forgets. As such, you should maintain consistent and responsible posts. You will be better able to protect your reputation if you do not offer enough reason for the development of negative perception. You should watch what you post carefully, and stay away from any obscene and vulgar content regardless of its success elsewhere. If you delegate functions to others, you should make sure to develop social media content policy that outlines how your team should act and post when representing your brand on social media.
Limit your advertising
While you need to maintain the marketing aspect of your brand on social media, many potential followers will associate your brand with unnecessary advertisements if you bombard them with products and services. Instead of taking up an advertisement-based social policy, consider connecting with them on a personal level, which social media is primed for. You will be better able to make sales this way, and could increase your ability to develop an ideal reputation. You should consider paid advertising options, such as igautolike.com – Instagram automation tool, leaving your platform free to engage and share other types of content.