Buying behavior of consumers has changed a lot these days. Most of the people do basic research about products or services before they make the purchase decisions. This is where online and social reputation is crucial for your business. 

Your online reputation is what people see when they search for you online or see what others say on social media about you. Online reputation is much more important than you think. We are living in the digital era, where anybody can get information about how you do business, what your values are, and how you treat your customers.

If you want to attract customers, you need to have a great online reputation and people should say great things about you and your business. In this article, we will look at various aspects and strategies for building a great social / Online reputation for your business.  

Why building a credible online reputation is important?

In this digital era, most people share their feedback about the quality of your products or services, customer experience, and ease of doing business with you in the form of Facebook posts, tweets, or by writing a review. 

Such reviews and feedback are the major influencing factors for others to choose a brand over their competitors. Sometimes negative feedback will go viral reaching thousands of users in a fraction of time. The worst part is that such feedback will be the subject of discussion by users for a very long time. It will severely damage your reputation and your brand’s image.

Most people look at a brand’s social presence to learn about new products and services. And remaining people use reviews to know about what your customers say about you. Your reputation can affect sales, customer base, and your ability to get new customers, employees, or investors. 

Consumers depend more on recommendations and reviews

Buying decisions are largely influenced by how your reviews are and how well you are recommended by your existing customers. A study revealed that 82% of Americans look for referrals and recommendations from family and friends before making any kind of purchase. This is where your reputation plays a crucial role. 

There are a lot of third-party review sites where users can see the feedback and reviews left by consumers who already used their product. Even google search will directly show the business reviews as a part of Google my business locations. 

Social word of mouth is crucial

Most of us hang on social media very often, it is now a part of our daily routine. On the good part, it’s now easy for a brand to reach their consumers through social media, engage with them and listen to them. But on the other side, consumers can spread their bad experience with a product as fast to millions of people by a single post. 

How to build a good online reputation for your brand?

You need to have a clear strategy and plan to build a good online reputation. As it’s clear about why reputation matters, let’s dig deep into strategies that are required to build an online reputation for your brand. 

1. Auditing your current reputation

Auditing is the first step to carry out the reputation-building strategy. Understanding where you stand will help in figuring out what to be done. List out all the social media channels and online review sites that you need to focus on. Identify where you have the presence and where you don’t have. 

With the data from the above audit, create content strategies for each social channel and strategies for managing your reviews. The next step is to identify the right tools for implementing your strategies. There are a lot of tools available to manage reviews, social media content management including keyword listener. 

2. Build your online profile

In the initial stage, you may not have a presence on major social media or review sites. Create accounts in all major review sites and social media channels where you currently don’t have a presence. 

Notify your users about your presence so that they start engaging with you in your new channels. This is a better way to connect with your existing customers and understand their feedback and sentiments about your brand.

3. Listen to the users and what they say about you

Once you had done with building your presence, start monitoring all your digital channels. There are various tools available in the market to monitor social media, and review sites and give insights into what your customers say. 

Talk to your users to collect genuine feedback through emails and conversations. This is the best way to understand your customers and get connected with them. 

Review sites are not the only places users leave feedback, many people share their negative experiences on social media, you should reach out to them to understand what went wrong. Fix them immediately and inform them about the same, this way you can create positive impacts out of negative reviews and shoutouts.

There are a lot of tools to listen to social media keywords, mentions, and posts. Create your company name as keywords and start listening to what people talk about. Track your mentions and try to respond to every mention as possible. 

4. Respond politely to people no matter if they are negative or positive

Nobody is happy to get a bad review. When you see a negative review or rating, normally people take it emotionally and feel insulted and think about the hard work they had poured in to build their product or business. Taking it personally is not the best way to address the issue or getting insulted or offended is not going to solve the whole issue. 

A study shows that 70% of customer experiences are based on how users feel they are being treated, so make sure all your customers feel cared for – even the unhappy ones.

People always like to do business with people who talk to their customers and take feedback for getting better. It shows that you care for your customer’s feedback. By listening to them, you will get a lot of insights about where to improve and how to excel in your business every day. 

If you ignore a negative review, your potential customers will know that you don’t care about them. Instead of ignoring them, try to respond to them politely and accepting the mistake, chances are there they can understand and come back to you in the future.

5. Take actions, fix issues, and notify people

Responding to negative reviews is not the only thing you should follow, fix the issue and notify them about the same. This will make them happy about you. When you fix the issue after seeing negative feedback, not only them but your whole audience will see this. It will give a huge impression about your way of listening to feedback to improve the quality of your business. 

Feedback is good to improve your business and products, always treat negative feedback as a gold mine to understand where you went wrong and how you can correct them to serve better next time.

6. Always Show up your brand presence

We are living in a busy world, everyone has their priorities, it’s important to show up your brand presence on all social media consistently. The most important thing is to be consistent. You can’t just tweet or post one time, it’s not enough. If you want to keep your brand presence, you have to be persistent. There are some rules you have to follow.

People forget easily, they will be engaged with what is showing up in their timelines or feeds at present. If you fail to be consistent, people may likely forget about your brand and products easily. 

It is therefore important that you keep in touch with your social media audience and this should be done via consistent information. Social media advertising is very effective and it would be the best way to market your business without spending much.

Do you feel like building your online reputation?

Online reputation is much important. It can increase your brand value, earn respect and create an identity about your brand culture. If you are yet to start with your reputation management strategy, start auditing about where you stand now. This can give a holistic view of actions that you need to take towards the first step of online reputation building.