Of course many companies want to avoid social media as there will be some opposition or heckling throughout the process, such is the web. With as fast and rapid as Social Media is changing it does seem overwhelming to keep up on top of the social web. This is where reputation management starts to become even more important.
A business’ online reputation is becoming more and more important as the social web continues to develop. Twitter and Facebook were laughable considerations for most companies only three years ago. Today many companies are getting very involved with social networking. Often much time is spent looking inward and companies will miss all of the activity going on outside of their efforts. Enter reputation management. Reputation management can help a company or individual contain their online efforts. For most it could be considered “preventative maintenance”.
One very important aspect to reputation management is looking at your competition’s reputation management. Identifying the companies you are actively competing with online should be one of the first steps in this process. Here we will give you a couple of ideas to get started with your reputation management and monitoring solutions; however, commercial reputation management and monitoring solutions will provide the deepest insight into what is actually going on.
First, start following your competition online. Chances are that much of your online competition is already involved in social media. Whether it be through Youtube, Twitter, Facebook or other social networking and social media, it is easy to find out where they are involved by simply searching for the company name after you have identified them as an online competitor. Once you are following your competition you will be notified of their specials, company news and anything else pertinent to their social media marketing.
Get Active! As you are following your competition you might notice that some of your competitor’s followers are getting involved in a particular service, event or product offering through your competitor. Ultimately this gives you an opportunity to invite those same followers to participate in a special event, product offering or service from your company. For example, let’s take a small pub in Denver. You notice on one of your competition’s twitter feed that they are offering ladies night specials with free drinks all evening, you might offer the same on your twitter feed and then “@” all of those followers on your competition’s twitter feed.
This post was meant as an introduction to reputation management, we will be going more in depth about engaging your customers and competition in future posts as well as monitoring your reputation management campaign. Many companies fail to consider their online reputation when considering their Colorado Web Design.
