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Social media is now a hotbed for conversation between consumers and brands. The very best companies are able to not only attract customers, but also manage their online reputation using the platforms and their ad systems. At a time where online reputation management is essential, we wanted to break down some tips for anybody struggling in this area.
Sometimes shortened to ORM, online reputation management is all about controlling the information people see regarding your brand. Your online reputation is what people think about and how they perceive your brand both in isolation and relative to services of a similar type.
One of the most important strategies is to reach the top spots in a given Google or Bing search result. Considering that the top handful of positions receive anouy 66% of all clicks, getting to this position helps you control what people read about your brand. Rather than getting their information elsewhere, or missing your brand completely, they come across your links.
Beyond ranking high on the SERP, another important element of managing your online reputation is addressing negative reviews. While dealing with negative reviews and comments online, encourage your loyal customers to leave positive reviews so the first point of contact new customers have with your company is a positive one.
With all this in mind, how do you use social media ads in this journey towards positive consumer perception? Below, we’ve listed six tips so that you can get started today!
Before anything else, decide on which goals you want to achieve with your online persona and profile. Do you want people to come to you as the authoritative source of news? Would you prefer a reputation for efficient customer service? Do you want to be the brand that people love because of its humor on social media? Too often, we see companies employing a strategy without knowing what they’re trying to achieve. First and foremost, think about what you want your online reputation to be and let every decision trace back to that determination.
If you’re not a brand new business, then you have an online reputation of some kind. Get insights from whoever you can; as long as they’re providing objective advice and don’t have a vested interest in the business itself, you should get a good idea of your online reputation quickly.
If you’re struggling at this stage, we recommend using one of the following tools:
Although it sounds simple, this is one of the biggest and best tips we can provide on this particular topic. Why waste your budget on ads for the wrong platform? To choose the right platform, you need to think about where your audience can be found in addition to what you’re trying to achieve with the campaign. If you’re targeting businesses or business professionals, LinkedIn might be most effective. The campaign might also find success on Facebook, Instagram or another platform.
Whether you’re focusing on online reputation management, exposure or another goal, choosing the right platform is always a good starting point.
Some businesses use social media ads to respond to a common misconception, complaint or something they want to correct in the market. To achieve this, you have to monitor the right areas. If you want to monitor and improve your online reputation, we recommend paying attention to the following:
Even after this, you should also attempt to monitor products and services, industry keywords and anything else that might inform the perception of your business in the market.
We’re in a completely different world than we were a couple decades ago. Not so long ago, brands were impenetrable entities that wouldn’t respond to customers and existed in some faraway land. Now, social media has brought the world together and we see companies and customers conversing on a daily basis. We urge you to be creative with your ads and not be afraid to engage with customers on social media.
Since we’re focusing on online reputation management, it’s important to address both the good and the bad. If there’s a concern that’s common across the market, you might want to address it with a clever ad campaign on your chosen social media platform. At the same time, and although it might sound scary, you also need to address negative comments. While you might not convince them to try your service again, you will convince others that you take complaints seriously. More often than not, people who leave an angry comment calm down after you respond and show that your brand listens.
Every business gets negative reviews - this is just a fact of life. Your job is to minimize the impact they have on the business by:
a. Addressing negative comments and demonstrate willingness to improve
b. Drowning the negativity out by encouraging positive reviews
How do you do this? One method is to pit your products against each other in a social media ad campaign. Let’s say you sell different styles of clothing, different flavors of food or different types of power tools; launch an ad campaign where the public has to vote for their favorite. Soon enough, the negativity is drowned out by the number of people talking about your products.
Don’t forget, regardless of your goals, a social media ad campaign will only find success if you’re willing to review the analytics and make improvements over time. If you decided to follow our tip of encouraging competitions and reviews, you’ll need to assess the engagement of your ads as well as the direct impact this has had on your reviews. If you suddenly see an uptick in customer reviews, this is great news. If nothing happens, it’s time to dig into the why and improve the campaign. Maybe you need to adjust the content or targeting to get the results you need.
Again, make sure you’re using the right platform for your audience and be willing to engage in order to get the best results. In terms of analytics, the best tends to come from Twitter and Facebook (and therefore also Instagram). While the analytics platform on LinkedIn isn’t as detailed, there’s no reason why you can’t learn what you need from it.
So far, we’ve focused heavily on using social media ads for online reputation management, yet you can improve results of the whole strategy by also creating high-quality content. You can encourage engagement again, get a higher position in the search rankings and draw positive attention to your brand. Your goals are aided by the content you produce on your blog, and those who want to be a market leader will need authoritative content. Here’s some tips for getting content right:
Keyword stuffing content is a strategy of the past. Knowing this, it’s important to focus on producing content that adds value and that people genuinely want to read. The reward will be an increase in engagement metrics and a favorable reputation.
