5 Sure-Fire Ways to Effectively Manage Your Social Media Reputation

Social media is one of the most telling platforms when it comes to brand reputation. When  used correctly, your brand’s profile can easily be a household name in your industry and even become a measuring stick for your competitors.

Reputation management is the summation of different strategies marketers use to increase awareness and build a positive reputation for their brands. On social media, it involves content planning, social listening, engagement and a lot more. If you’re new to social media reputation management, here are five steps you can take to help create a positive and powerful impression on your audience.

1. Verify your account

The blue checkmark on your Instagram profile makes it easier for more people to develop trust in your brand. Having the verified badge means that your profile has been confirmed as an authentic and official representation of your brand or notable person. Additionally, this lets brands and creator profiles stand out and lessens the risk of being impersonated.

You need to meet a couple of qualifications in order to get verified on Instagram. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no set number of followers required to get verified on the platform. However, according to their Terms of Use and Community Guidelines, accounts must first meet these top four criteria:

• Authentic: The account must represent a real person, a registered business or an entity
• Unique: The account must be a representation of a unique person or business. This means that Instagram may only verify one account per person or business, with the exception of language-specific accounts
• Complete: Accounts applying for verification must be public, complete with a bio, and profile photo and are active on the platform
• Notable: The account must represent a well-known individual or business, or must frequently be searched on the platform. If your account meets the following criteria, it can be applied for verification, and Instagram will review your profile and notify you within 30 days

2. Be consistent with your brand identity

Building your brand identity on social media helps your account to stand out from your competition. Your brand identity is how you want people to perceive you through visual, verbal and emotional projection. It’s an aggregate of how you speak to your followers, tell your stories and engage your audience through your compelling social media posts and content.

Identify the purpose of your brand and your target audience. Then, set a tone on how you speak to your followers and stick with it. Standardizing a color palette for your profile makes it easier to build a visual identity. Use branded hashtags to easily track your posts and how people engage with your brand. More importantly, create your own website, with the help of your dedicated web development team, to help your customers learn more about your services. No matter what you share, make sure that what you put out is always aligned with your brand identity.

3. Keep your eyes (and ears) on the ground

Finding out what people are saying about you and your brand is one of the best strategies for maintaining a good reputation on social media. Social listening helps with finding out the public’s opinion about your brand so you can adjust or respond to it accordingly. Take advantage of several social listening tools to help you determine ongoing consumer trends and anticipate any crisis that may arise. These tools can help you track mentions and conversations across several platforms to give you better insights and help you develop plans to put in place to strengthen and improve your brand’s social media presence.

4. Respond to comments and reviews 

Nothing feels better than knowing that your opinion matters. It’s the same feeling your followers or customers get when they receive a response to the reviews they leave on your brand’s page.

Remember to respond professionally and avoid reacting negatively to unpleasant statements. Don’t delete comments or reviews as this can easily worsen a scenario. Instead, acknowledge their opinion and provide steps that you plan on taking to improve their experience. Whether it’s good or bad, the simple acknowledgment reaffirms to your followers that you’re listening to them and sometimes can even turn a negative review around.

5. Engage with your followers

Another way to help improve your social media reputation is to engage with your followers. Create content that triggers your audience to hit the like button, comment or even share them on their own pages. This not only helps you get more mileage on social media but helps promote your brand positively through word of mouth.

You may also put out content that deliberately asks your audience to interact with you. Take advantage of Instagram story stickers to ask questions, create polls, set event notifications and much more. This way, followers get a fair share of boosting your presence on the platform in a more interactive manner.

Final thoughts

There’s no one way to manage your brand’s social media reputation and it’ll  never be an easy task. However, it can be rewarding to see how your page grows through your content and interactions with your followers. Start with following these steps and you’re sure to get more folks to positively engage with you and your brand on social media.