Maintaining a company’s online reputation is more important than ever in our digital world. Examples of bad PR and social media nightmares can be seen in cases from Dominos to the United Airlines debacle. Thus, social media can destroy a company’s returns in seconds. It doesn’t help that negative comments online have almost double the impact of positive ones (Brynley-Jones, 2009).
Tracking your social media is key to keeping tabs on what is being said and done within and about your company. There are many programs to help track and manage your social media accounts. GoogleAlerts, WhosTalkin, and SocialMention are all good programs that can track your keywords, company name, web address, product names and employees (Brynley-Jones, 2009).
It’s also possible to set up RSS feeds to alert you with programs like If This Then That (IFTT), to keep you abreast on industry mentions (Schmitz, 2014). If a website mentions your company, IFTT can send you an e-mail alert (Schmitz, 2014). Not only that, but the program can automatically forward blog posts to Twitter accounts and other automated social media actions.
In order to fully accomplish the goal of managing your companies online social media reputation. You’ll need to:
- Decide what to track (i.e. keywords, names, etc.). (Brynley-Jones, 2009).
- Choose social monitoring tools (i.e. wholinkstome.com and backtype.com). (Brynley-Jones, 2009).
- Set up alerts (i.e. If This Then That). (Schmitz, 2014).
- Set up social media accounts and manage them effectively: Use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, etc. and manage them through sites like HooteSuite or Buffer (Pilon, 2017).
- Engage socially online and utilize public relations professionals for pro-active and re-active engagement.
Because the internet is always ‘on’ you’ll need to monitor the company’s online reputation every day. Issues and even negative comments need to be addressed as soon as possible, if not immediately (Schmitz, 2014). Negative comments need to be handled immediately and professionally but major social issues, like the recent United Airlines issue, needs a public relations department to rectify and address the public through both press releases and social media.
Brynley-Jones, L. (2009). A 5-Step Guide to Social Media Reputation Management. Retrieved from http://oursocialtimes.com/a-5-step-guide-to-social-media-reputation-management/.
Pilon, A. (2017). 52 Social Media Management Tools You Must Have for Your Business. Retrieved from https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/02/social-media-management-tools.html.
Schmitz, P. (2014). 5 Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/tools-monitor-online-reputation/.
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