Back in the day, your website was the only presence you needed to reach new customers. With all the buzz about social media and blogging, a business that wants to stay ahead of the game must engage and interact on a frequent basis on these platforms. Engaging on various social media channels brings a new set of PR and digital marketing responsibilities that must be integrated in your business if you want to protect and expand your business on the web.

A well thought out social media marketing strategy is a good way to promote your business via the social web, but a poorly managed one can quickly damage your reputation online. Constantly managing your social media profiles without a dedicated strategy on the channels you are using such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and even Pinterest can be expensive and time-consuming for a small business owner where time directly translates to money.

Everyone is talking about all the social media and digital marketing buzz on how you can use it to build brand awareness, engage with targeted audiences, and for marketing purposes, but what are you going to do when people are talking negatively about you online? Did you know that you can use a online reputation management (ORM) strategy to help protect your online image and at the same time support your brand awareness and marketing campaigns? Find below three ways online reputation management can be used to increase and protect your brand image online.

Creating a positive brand image

More people are searching online for answers before they decide whether or not to give a business a try. If the results on the first page of the search engine result pages are only negative, the chances are very good that they will jump to the next search. The top search engines such as Google and Bing are including social media into their search results and when someone has anything negative to say about a business, they usually turn to their favorite social network and start flaming away. These “negative” comments have a tendency to spread like wildfire and could end up being indexed on the search engines when someone is searching for your brand name.

With an online reputation management strategy, you will be able to protect your business from negative online comments. Are you going to respond with to these negative comments? What are you going to say? With your ORM strategy, you can create a positive social media experience with consumers and encourage loyal customers to praise your brand.

Boosting online visibility

If you want to appear on the first page of the search engine results with excellent reviews and intriguing content does not happen by accident.  To boost your online visibility on the search engines, it is very crucial to get top rankings on the search results. Online reputation management can increase your visibility on the search engines by using various digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

With online reputation management, you will also be able to target your social media strategy to a desired targeted audience. With this you will be able to engage among your current and potential customers which increases your online visibility.

Become trusted

People buy from people that they know and trust. Online reputation management gives you the ability to control how your business is viewed by the general public. By increasing the amount of positive information and content that shows up on your selected social media channels and the search engine results creates trusts among potential prospects.

Potential customers will definitely not trust your company with their business if there’s a lack of overall brand consistency across your online presence. With online reputation management, you can streamline your brand management and this creates consistently a positive brand presence.

	About: Anton Koekemoer I’m a digital marketing specialist and I’m very passionate about online marketing. My main goal with marketing on the web focuses on designing strategic plans and business solutions around digital technologies to get good results. I’m also a blogger, dad, and I like golf, photography, and music.