Social media has been one of the most world-changing inventions of the information age. We’ve seen its potential to bring people together and to tear people apart when negative material is posted. Negative social media reviews may be able to ruin your reputation, but positive, proactive social media participation is the best way to counteract negative content or to create positive buzz. If you have a brand or business whose reputation you want to safeguard or improve, social media can be a valuable tool for pushing down negative content and controlling how people feel about you.
“When you have a reputation issue, it is likely that the negative content is ranking in the first page of Google. One of the best ways to combat this is by creating many social media profiles and be active on them,” says Pierre Zarokian of Reputation Stars, an online reputation management company.
Everyone is familiar with social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and these sites are so influential that it’s easy to get them into the top search engine rankings if you create social media profiles containing your brand name. Active participation and engagement will then help you build brand awareness and an audience, which is crucial for getting the likes, friends, followers, and engagement that you need for higher-ranking profiles.
A good tactic for increasing likes, friends, and engagement is setting up profiles on as many social media sites as possible. Based on our experience, it’s best to have a minimum of 300 different profiles. This also protects you from cyber squatters and people planning to place negative content on your social media sites.
Blogging is another powerful tool for influencing search engine rankings and brand image. If you create new blogs with domain names or URLs that contain your brand name, those pages can also rank high on searches for your brand if you are regularly posting new content. Sites such as Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogspot also allow you to create blogs with subdomains. You can take advantage of this feature to include your brand name as part of the subdomain (yourbrandname.wordpress.com).
Pierre Zarokian adds: “Freshness is a major factor in the Google algorithm. Make sure to always post fresh content. In Twitter I recommend that you post at least 3 times daily. In turn, 3 of your latest posts would show up on Google and might help to take over additional real estate on the front page of Google.”
Do not just concentrate on the major social media platforms. If you are in technology open up profiles on Angel.co and Crunchbase. Quora is also good, but you need to be active on it and answer questions on a regular basis. Medium.com is also another great platform. Although it is a blogging platform, they do not give you a subdomain. Instead you can just make your user ID to contain your brand name and your URL will be in the following format: medium.com/@yourbradname.
Finally, do not just use the same exact bio on all your profiles, because that would create duplicate content and would not rank well in Google. Each of your profiles should have a unique bio that is not repeated word-by-word, but slightly different. In addition, cross link all your social medias to each, if this is something that the platform would allow.
If you are looking for an expert in reputation management to help you, contact Pierre Zarokian on Guru.