Be Proactive!
What’s the best way to manage your online presence? BE PROACTIVE!
Ask clients, mentors, etc to review you and your company online! You should make sure to have a few reviews anywhere that your company has an online presence (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.). The key to getting clients to review your company, is to remind them, and make it easy! Pick a handful of clients to email each week or each month (depending on how often you decide). Be sure to include a link in the email that directs your clients directly to the site where you would like them to leave a review. This makes it easy…and therefore more apt to be completed!
There are companies you can use to automatically contact people, on your behalf, to review you as well. You enter emails into the system, tell them how often to email and how many to email each time, and the companies take care of the rest! Two great tools that you can use to contact people on your behalf are Getfivestars and Grade Us. There is even a widget that can be added right to your website!
Now what happens if you get a negative review? Don’t freak out! EVERYONE gets a negative review every now and then! It happens and consumers expect it. A negative review can be a really good thing, (just as long as it’s not your ONLY review).
When looking through reviews…it’s almost more suspect if there are NO negative reviews. People coming to your site and reading the reviews are going to see through the negativity,especially if you respond to them correctly.
What’s most important in dealing with a negative review is how you re-act to it. HOW a company deals with a negative review tells more about the company and it’s practices, then a syrupy, spectacular review.
So negative reviews can be helpful as long as you manage it properly: HOW?
- Contact the person who left the review to try to better the situation
- If you are able to make the situation better, ask the client to retract their bad review, or leave another review showing that the situation was fixed.
- Make sure you also leave a comment to their negative review explaining what you did to make the situation right.
- Be sure you are very professional and calm in your comment to the review.
Be sure to ask 2 or 3 people (who you know will leave you a positive review) to review your company right after the bad review, so that the positive reviews push the negative review down and it is not the first review people see.
Get in the habit of leaving reviews online for companies who you have had a good experience with. If you want people to review you, make sure you are out reviewing them!
So in conclusion, maintaining a healthy online reputation is EXTREMELY important and something that is not just done once. It takes constant awareness and maintenance to keep your company and name in a positive light. So stay on top of it!
