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5 Ways to Manage Your Reputation on Social Media

April 13, 2018 | Techno Goober |

When it comes to managing your business’s reputation, there are a few key metrics you should be paying attention to. You know most of them by now:

  1. Reviews
  2. Followers
  3. Referrals
  4. Retention
  5. Others?

Reviews

The first one is obvious. You want to have different reviews from different customers in a variety of places to ensure that no matter where your prospective customers are looking. Encourage your happy customers to leave reviews on Yelp, Google, Facebook, and directly on your website. Bad reviews can be difficult to manage, but they will happen. Get help managing bad reviews. 

You’ll want to keep your reviews fresh too. Reviews become outdated to prospective customers after a few weeks. You should aim to earn 1 new (positive) review every week. Rotate through your various review sites to ensure fresh content.

[bctt tweet=”Reviews become outdated to prospective customers after a few weeks. You should aim to earn 1 new (positive) review every week. Rotate through your various review sites to ensure fresh content.” username=”Techno_Goober”]

Manage Your Reputation Online

Followers

Speaking of Facebook, the next important metric to keep in mind is the number of followers you have on social media. Your business should strive for an active social media presence on all of the major social media networks.

If you haven’t already, set up a Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram account, and LinkedIn account for your business. Most of these social networks require that you have a personal page to manage the business account, but you don’t have to be active on that account for the business page to find success.

Your business should aim to post consistently on every social media account. If you can, try to post at least once per day on each account. Vary your posts between images, text, sharing other content, and other posts.

It goes without saying, but the more followers the better. Just, don’t ever buy followers. These are fake accounts that will spam your real followers and harm your business.

Referrals

This may not be a direct metric of your business’s reputation, but referrals to your business can tell you a lot about what people think of you.

If you don’t already, ask people where, how, and who they heard about your business or services from. Keep track of their answers. You may notice an interesting trend.

For example, a large portion of your calls may originate from a specific customer with a particularly amazing experience. Or, you may find that most of your referrals come from Facebook groups dedicated to suggesting local businesses with excellent reputations.

Collecting this data will also help you track trends over time. You may notice that every winter you receive fewer referrals from Facebook for example. It will also let you know if you suddenly stop receiving referrals from a particular location, which may signal a problem with your reputation.

Consider rewarding customers that refer new business to you. This will encourage them to continue to be your brand ambassadors. You can give them a shout-out on social media, send them a note in the mail, or reward them with discounts or gift cards.

Retention

Retention is closely related to referrals and followers. Are the same customers coming back time and time again? Repeat customers are important to track for your business. These repeat customers will a great source of referrals for your business.

However, a drop in customer retention over time may signal a problem with your reputation online. If several repeat clients suddenly stop coming around, consider reaching out and seeing if there’s anything you can do to encourage them to come back. They may tip you off to any other looming reputation threats.

What About the Others?

But what about the other metrics? The ones you might not be able to see, or the ones that you just haven’t thought about looking for yet.

Everyone knows that social media is a frequent source of reputation building and managing. However, you may not be looking everywhere. There may be some reputation killers (or builders) lurking in the shadows.

Facebook and Instagram both allow users to post photos and statuses at a particular location without tagging that actual location’s branded social media profile.

What does this mean?

It means that there may be customer recounts, referrals, reviews, and more on these social media sites that you’ve never seen.

How do you find them?

It is actually very easy to find these posts and pages.

On Facebook, start by searching for your location in the search bar.

Search on Facebook

Rather than viewing page results, instead view the “photos” results or “places” results. Look for results that weren’t posted by your own page. You may see some posts or check-ins that you had no idea existed. This page for example has 6 reviews and a number of photos that aren’t managed by the business. We checked, and this business has a managed Facebook business page too. 

Unofficial page

On Instagram, search for your company name or location as various hashtags like “#technogoober” to see posts from users. Techno Goober noticed a lot of posts from visitors or fans using this method.

Instagram result for #TechnoGoober

Are You Managing Your Reputation Online?

If you aren’t managing your reputation online, you may not know what your customers really think about you. This could cost you money every day with bad reviews or posts online.

If you are too busy or don’t know how to manage your reputation on social media, Techno Goober will do it for you! Hire us for your full service of social media management including reputation management.

Call 302-645-7177 or visit us online to learn more about social media management or to schedule your free consultation today. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

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