First things first. You need to know that you can spend years building your brand and then lose it all in just one week, or even one day, with a “bad” social media post. That’s why you need to know how to navigate this landscape safely.
It can feel overwhelming to monitor everything people are saying about your brand on LinkedIn, Facebook/Meta, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter/X, and more. Unlike with a website, where content can be carefully curated, social media is a free-for-all. Other users have the ability to interact with your content in a way that can promote or destroy your brand. The spontaneous nature of social media keeps things fresh and authentic, but it also makes things risky.
That’s why it’s so important to make sure your social media is working for you, not against you. How do you ensure this? Start with these five tips.
1. Evaluate Your Social Media Presence
Start by making an honest assessment of where you stand in the social media scene. Where do you have a presence? Which channels are most important for your brand? If you make beautiful cakes that look dazzling in photographs, Instagram is probably a great platform for you. But if you’re an accountant, the image-centric vibe of the Gram may not be the best choice.
Are you a life coach who connects to your target audience with stress management videos? Or a politician who creates videos demystifying ballot measures? If so, YouTube may be a good choice for you.
Regardless of which platform you choose to have a presence on, make sure that your profile looks aesthetically pleasing and professional. And make sure that you have time to keep your accounts updated, and by updated, we mean posting something at least once per day. That may sound excessive, but your competition may be doing more. If you want to look relevant and engaged/engaging, you’ll need to maintain a good tempo for updates.
If you don’t have time to build an attractive profile and stay on top of the updates, you have the potential to do more harm than good. That’s why a general rule is to go in full throttle or stay out of the social media scene altogether.
2. Keep Your Posting in Line with Your Brand
Take the time to define your brand and target audience and make sure that your engagement stays aligned with these definitions. Let’s say you’re an executive of a high-end hotel chain. Naturally, your online community engagement will need to reflect the nature of your business—distinguished, polished, and professional.
On the other hand, if you’re a counterculture skater who sells skater tees made from sustainable materials, your engagement will be completely different. You’ll want to speak the skater crowd language and keep your voice cool and casual. You’ll want to share posts that reflect your commitment to the environment.
Social media is an ideal realm for building your brand, so make sure your communications paint a very clear picture of who you are and what you’re about.
And don’t forget another big perk of a strong, trustworthy social media presence: If people come to know and trust you through your consistent engagement, they’ll be more likely to look past the one-off negative comment or review that will inevitably float in.
3. Respond to Feedback
And speaking of negative reviews, since nobody’s perfect, there will always be negative reviews and feedback. Since you can’t completely avoid it, focus instead on building trust with your community and having a plan in place for how you respond to negative feedback while promoting your brand.
As a general rule, it’s better to respond than have negative feedback hanging out there. Keep things positive and concise and follow these steps:
- Acknowledge the concern
- Apologize for the unsatisfactory experience
- Accept responsibility (don’t make an excuse or pass the buck)
- Offer a plan to make things right
This can turn a negative into a positive by showing your community that you are concerned about their concerns and committed to resolving them.
If there is a specific resolution involved, or if things continue to escalate, try to take the conversation offline. That way, you can still engage with the affected person (group) while minimizing unwarranted public attention.
4. Monitor Your Online Presence
Just as you need to update and monitor your own accounts, you need to watch how you’re being portrayed or referred to on others’ accounts. Like it or not, you can be tagged in a post, even if it is controversial or demeaning to your brand.
Make sure your accounts are configured so that you get notified anytime you’re tagged, but that won’t solve the whole problem. You can be mentioned in a post WITHOUT a tag, so you will need to run regular searches to see where your name is appearing. An online reputation management service can help you with this.
Keep an eye on your past posts, too, to make sure they don’t run afoul of current culture. If a post you have made in the past overlaps with a controversial cultural issue that is now emerging, you may need to consider removing it to avoid it coming back to haunt you later.
5. Learn from Your Community
Online feedback or criticism can be brutally honest, but that’s not always a bad thing. Try not to take it personally but to turn it into a learning experience. You can rule out some criticism as arbitrary and irrelevant, but other times, you might see patterns emerging that show how people are perceiving you.
What could you do to shore up your reputation? How could you help people get a more accurate picture of who you really are? Are there things you need to stop doing that might be giving people the wrong idea? Or things you could start doing to improve your public image?
Conclusion
A strong social media presence can burnish your brand and win over loyal followers. Build and monitor your online presence carefully, and if you do find yourself being pulled into a firestorm, stay positive. All is not lost. Many people have bounced back from online reputation fiascoes. A good social media online reputation management agency can help minimize the negative and maximize the positive so you come out on top.