4 Tips to Protect Your Brand’s Online Reputation

RISMedia
Published: 06/20/2012
Posted by: RET Staff

Have you Googled your brand lately? Did you like the results you saw? Having negative search results appear in the top 10 results of Google can be very disconcerting for a brand. It affects the sales funnel from initial organic click to sale. There are two main phases of online reputation: prevention and crisis.

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure
Don’t have a reputation problem yet? Fantastic! However, inevitably, almost every brand faces a reputation challenge of some sort during its lifetime. Public relations practitioners encourage having a crisis communications plan in place to handle a crisis if one should arise. It can be difficult to effectively coordinate efforts during a crisis (the same is true for an online crisis). It’s best to be prepared before a crisis occurs.

Here are four tips to help your brand protect its online reputation:

1. Claim social media profiles. First and foremost, it’s important to claim your brand on various digital properties. For instance, Google often highly ranks social media profiles in brand searches. Make sure you create a social media profile for each of the following social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Once your profiles are created, link to them via a Google+ profile page, placing the links in the “About” tab. A Google+ profile helps the search engine tie together all of the related sites to your brand.

2. Create a blog. If you don’t have a blog, start one. Blogs frequently rank highly in organic search results, as well as offer great content fodder to populate your social media profiles, helping drive website visits from multiple channels.