Tips and Tools to Improve Your Social Media Reputation

March 8, 2019 | lora reuther

By: Lora Reuther

Imagine you own a cheese shop and recently found a Google review that claimed you sold someone moldy cheese and this review has been left to stew for months attracting comments and dislikes. You’re the expert – you understand that bloom on brie is natural and delicious, but there could be more than a few customers who stumble on that review and turn their nose the other way. There are many daily practices and tools you can implement in your social media strategy to avoid missing reviews or facing a devastating social media fail. Check out our list of easy social media tips and tools and implement what’s missing from your strategy to improve your online reputation.

1. Have at Least Two Social Media Channels

If you’re not on social media you’re missing out on an inexpensive and effective way to connect with new customers and grow your business. When it comes to social presence, there are many channels available to fit your brand – Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and the like all offer popular platforms that millions visit every day. While you don’t have to create a profile for every social media platform, you should try to be active on at least two. But which platform will work best for you? Understand your brand’s audience, age range, and interests to target the right social media platform. A few to consider:

Facebook is the most active social network on the web with over 2 billion users worldwide. It offers the ability to share photos, videos, post text, links, event invites, and live videos. If your business is marketed to an older audience, this is a great choice, but can it work with most niches and ages thanks to its large demographic of users.

If your audience skews a little younger and your creative content is video and photo heavy, Instagram is the platform for you. You’ll have the unique opportunity to share stories and live videos, and you can create a business page to track analytics.

Are you in BDB sales? LinkedIn is the community to join with over 500 million users made of up of executives, professionals and decision-makers. Create a business page, participate in groups and connect with former coworkers and colleagues. LinkedIn also offers paid advertising that can help you reach professionals outside of your network.

There are many more platforms that you can consider including Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube – more on YT below. Whichever you choose, be sure to stay active. A profile left to collect cobwebs will reflect badly on your brand.

2. Monitor Your Social Media Accounts Daily

It’s important to look at your online presence daily for comments, message and reviews. Whether the comments are positive or negative you’ll want to respond and click the like button. As you grow your followers your engagement will spike along with it, so be sure that your customer service is on point. The quicker you respond to questions and complaints the more you’ll build trust in your brand and be awarded with a great response time on Facebook that’s visible to your followers. Set up alerts for your social media pages, blog posts and online reviews like Google and Yelp. Facebook also offers you the ability to set up automated responses that are sent when a customer sends a message to you. Even if you can’t be there to respond immediately, send a friendly message thanking them and letting them know you’ll respond shortly.

3. Plan Your Social Content

An effective social media campaign closely monitors engagement, comments on posts and notes which content works best. By reflecting on engagement, we can better plan and produce creative content that will get the best response. This is a continuous process that requires keeping a close eye on your pages daily. Ideally, the most active brands will post social media content at least once every day. Don’t panic though – research shows that posting content at least several times a week will do more to boost your social media number than almost any other effort. It may sound difficult, but the pros write and schedule social posts as far as several weeks in advance. Use this strategy to your advantage – when inspiration strikes, write, write, write! Having a queue of post-ready social media content keeps your brand in the public eye and will save you a ton of stress going forward. You can do this by utilizing a social media calendar and scheduling posts using a platform like Hootesuite. There are several scheduling tools tailored to fit different needs that you can try.

4. Boost It

Now that you’ve carefully curated your posts, ensure that they will be seen by boosting them. Identify the best performing posts and give them a nudge on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to increase the number of people who see them. Posts with high quality photos and a call to action will perform the best. Your goal is to direct them to your website or to follow your social media page. Be careful to not share posts with heavy text. Facebook may deny your boosted post if it contains more than 20% text. You can check your images for text compliancy by using this nifty text overlay tool. After you’ve boosted your post be sure to like, love and comment. Facebook will also notify you when somebody likes your post and you can invite them to follow your page. Check your page notifications and ad performance daily to catch those new followers and turn off any underperforming ads.

5. Use Social Media Analytic Tools

What are your top-performing social media posts? A great way to gauge whether your social media strategy is working is to dive into analytics. There are several tools to help you understand what content is working. If you’re concerned with ROI this is an essential task to add to your strategy. Google Analytics, Iconosquare, and Buzzsumo are all great platforms to check out. View your performance weekly and create monthly reports that show analytics on your followers, engagement, reach, interactions, top posts and more. Take these results and tailor your creative content and strategy to improve your campaign.

6. Encourage Customers to Write Reviews

What better way to get free advertising than to ask your customers for their feedback? Encourage fans to submit reviews by encouraging them in your next newsletter, offering a link on their receipt or asking when they reach out with feedback. If you have a website, create an option to leave reviews on products. Make it easy and send your review request in a timely matter – not immediately after they make a purchase, but within a few days or weeks to ensure they received the product and have had a chance to try it out. Ask the right questions so you can find out exactly what works and what you can do better. Reviews make great pull quotes for your social media feed so ask for permission to share with your followers.

7. Don’t Forget YouTube

Did you know that YouTube is still one of the biggest drivers of social branding? For many people, internet streaming services have largely replaced network and cable tv as the primary source of entertainment, and YouTube is the biggest and most influential of all. With over 5 billion videos on offer and more than 30 million visitors each day, YT offers a huge user base to build subscribers from. If you’re having trouble imagining what your brand might look like in video format, fret not – some of the biggest channels offer niche content like product reviews and unboxings, video game streaming, and video podcasts. If your content is compelling enough to draw users from other social platforms, it’s probably compelling enough to put on YouTube.

What Social Media Tips and Tools Work for You?

Social media trends and best practices are changing every day. Let us know what tips and tools you use in your strategy to improve your social media reputation. If you need help with your campaign get in touch with the Orca Pod. We offer social media and influencer packages that can help you build your online community.