Repair damaged online reputation using Social media

As an online marketer, blogger or content writer or even a brand, your online reputation determines how people see you and do business with you. Your online reputation determines the level of trust customers can have in you whether to transact business with you or not.

Every business or marketer should protect their online reputation proactively because in today’s business world, your online reputation is your actual reputation. A bad online reputation can scare off your potential customers, clients, partners, investors or employers etc. That’s exactly why I will advise you not to mess it up in the first place.

But what if the damage has been done already? How do you handle it? How do you deal with the negative comments about you flooding the search engine results when your name or brand is looked up on search?

While there are other advises I can give you on online reputation management ORM, this article will be tilted towards using social media to repair your damaged online reputation. While it will seem easier to pay someone to clean up your mess, it may not really be the best practice especially when you are the cause of your bad online reputation.

No one knows you better than you, a bad online reputation may be as a result of misconceived ideas about you or your brand, so that is why you will be the best person to fix your damaged online reputation using the social media.

“Create Social media accounts and write your own stories”

When you perform a Google search of your name or your brand what do you see? That’s same thing your customers or people will see when they perform same search.

Social media can be used as a powerful tool to replace all those search engine results saying bad things about you. Social media has a powerful and underutilized search function that can uncover a gold mine of information regarding what is being said about you or your business.

Take advantage of the social media today in repairing your damaged online reputation, create an account on the various major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ etc and fill up your profile appropriately with sincere information about you, don’t be fake because people can still see through it and this may further damage your online reputation more than it is already damaged.

Add good looking pictures of you as your profile pictures, you can even take it a bit further by adding more good looking pictures of you. People like good images so give them something to begin to like about you. I hope you’ll be smiling on that picture.

Make friends with people or friends you know with good reputations who are ready to accept you with your damaged online reputation, maybe they can rub off some good reputation on you or you can leverage on their good reputation to repair yours.

Engage actively in your social media accounts, don’t just create these accounts and abandon them. Remember you are on a mission, so schedule time in your busy day to engage with your friends and followers on the social networks.

Write your own stories from your engagements. Admit to your mistakes and apologize anytime someone comes up with it. Respond to every question directed to you, do not ignore anyone no matter how small they may seem.

Always be of your best behavior while online, send concerned fans/followers direct messages addressing whatever issues they may have with you.

Engage in dialogue once you find any conversation that involves you. By engaging them in conversation on social media, you not only might be able to convince them to rescind some of the negative comments they may have made about you while they were angry with you, but more importantly, you’ll have put it on the record for everyone to see that you attempted to engage and correct a perceived injustice.

Host giveaways on your social media accounts, people like freebies. Give them something to happily compete for in exchange to changing their minds about you.

If your reputation is untarnished, work to keep it that way, else you may have to work hard to repair it. Sometimes it takes long to repair a damaged online reputation, so you will need to be patient and persistent. Every broken or damaged object can most times be fixed.

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