How to Use Social Media to Improve Your Reputation

There are many ways to improve your reputation online. Social media is one effective means of boosting visibility, brand awareness, and engagement with others. 

Social media can either be a godsend or a nightmare for your online reputation. With over 2 billion users spread across the major social networks… it’s simply way to influential for you to ignore. In fact, ignoring social media altogether may result in an even worse online reputation than where you might currently be at!

In this article we are going to make social media become your best friend and confidant in your journey to improving your reputation, while also improving how others can find and interact with you or your brand online.

Follow these simply steps and you will gradually see your personal and/or business brand not only being followed by more people, but also ranking higher in the search results and also seeing improved numbers across the board.

How to Use Social Media to Improve Your Online Reputation

Though there are many ways and numerous reputation management services to improve your exposure and reputation through social media, each of them is effective in their own way. We recommend you approach each of them differently and put them into action as soon as possible.

Securing Your Brand Name Across All Social Networks

The most popular social networks are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram — though hundreds of other sites exist. No matter what network you focus the most effort on, you need to actively search out and secure your personal and brand name on each and every network.

Not only will this give you ownership over your own name, but it will also protect you from someone else using this name and posting content that isn’t related to what your or your brand represents.

This can be done manually, or you can use a bulk search service like Knowem to speed up the process.

Proper Social Media Etiquette

As mentioned, social media can be your best friend or it can be your nightmare. What’s posted on social media stays on social media and it can also go viral in the process and even rank in the search results.

Some social media best practices is are to share your own internal content, share content from other well known and trusted sources, reply and engage with other social media mentions or updates around your brand and always keeping it professional at all times.

Keep Your Social Media Branding Consistent

Along with making sure your brand is securing it’s name across all of the major networks, you also want to make sure your branding and messaging is staying the same as well.

This includes backgrounds, logos, descriptions and the type of content being posted. Not everyone is going to follow your brand updates through the same social networks, so you are going to want to make sure you are spreading out your content through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at all times.

Using Social Media to Secure Top Search Rankings

Google loves social media. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all rank extremely well in the search results for pretty much anything. This also includes the names of brand and individuals that create accounts on these sites as well.

We already mentioned the importance of securing your personal and brand name, but we also need to cover the importance of actively using social media in your marketing and branding outreach.

With the proper linking and focus, when someone searches for your name or brand online in Google, not only should they find your main web site and/or blog, but also all of your social profiles on the main page as well.

The more your own content ranks in the search results for your name and brand, the better chances you have to control your online reputation and how others see your brand. Be it having a brand manager, an ORM agency, or doing it yourself, social media is an essential part of your ORM strategy. Follow these social media best practices, and you will be that much more in control over how others see your brand while also increasing your customer loyalty.