Today, consumers are cleverer than ever. While businesses used to manage their reputation with the help of advertising, they’re now discovering that word-of-mouth advertising is on the upsurge thanks to virtual tools such as social media and native review websites. The following article will take a close look at the best used practices of social media and describe how they could aid any business to recover its reputation.

Twitter

Twitter is an effective tool which allows businesses to manage the conversation as it relates to them. When a business creates a fresh post, or a tweet, its followers see it instantly, just like a press release. One disadvantage to such instantaneousness is that if a business makes a tweet which it regrets, for example a violent tweet or one which imprecisely defines a product or its cost, the damage will already be done. At such point, the lone option should be damage control, which normally will not be sufficient to keep a company’s reputation undamaged. For such reasons, numerous companies favor not to risk creating a reputation-damaging blunder and instead prefer to outsource.

Facebook

Facebook is another useful tool for establishments as it allows a business to link with its greatest loyal consumers, who select to like their respective pages. Businesses could use their Facebook page in order to post videos or pictures of fresh products, and even share info about how the enterprise supports the public. However, companies must check their page frequently. If a possible customer asks any question on the business’s page and doesn’t receive a speedy response, research have revealed that they’ll start losing interest in dealing with such company. Furthermore, former consumers could use a business’s page to post criticisms or info which damages the establishment’s brand. A business should constantly monitor its profile in order to ensure that its reputation doesn’t take a smash. As most companies lack enough time, familiarity or resources with social sites in order to monitor their profile, they regularly outsource such task to a well-established online reputation management company.

Additionally, there are much more social media choices available for businesses in particular industries. Nevertheless, a weakly managed social media account is likely to do more damage than good, just like undesirable content which spreads on social websites in order to damage the establishment’s reputation. In order to keep from ruining its status on various social media websites, a business must hire a well-established online reputation management organization.

Ripoffreport.com is not just any consumer complaint website; it ranks high in major search engine results for any given brand or company mentioned on the site. In other words, if your business is listed on Ripoffreport.com, everyone can see. More importantly, if your business is listed on Ripoffreport.com, it can shatter your success and how consumers view your company.

Reputation management is nothing new; business owners have had to deal with this aspect of running a business long before the internet was introduced. However, the web has a way of bombarding consumers with a wealth of information, including negative critiques, which is then replicated by algorithms and search engines, and spread as quickly as the Black Death plague. Consequently, it is nearly impossible for business owners to manage their online reputations without the help of professional online reputation management firms.

If you’ve researched online reputation management, you know that it is impossible to remove a negative review on Ripoffreport.com and other similar sites. But hope exists for businesses listed on Ripoffreport.com; there are several ways to bury the negative content to the second or third page of search engine results, and potentially repair your online reputation in the process.

One way to combat negative online reviews, for example, is to create a lot of social media profiles and be active on them. Often times Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media profiles will rank highly for a given brand or comapny name. There are hundreds of smaller social media sites that can help as well, such as Hi5, Flickr, Digg, Stumbleupon and more. Creating profiles on these sites maunually could be a daunting task, which could take hours, if not days. Fortunatly, there is a service out there that you can use, if you do not want to do this yourself. iClimber’s Social Profile Creation service would create up to 300 social media profiles for you.

While it will remove Ripoff Report listing per se, an optimized social media profile can improve your online reputation by ranking higher than the negative feedback on sites like Ripoffreport.com.

Ripoffreport.com can be disastrous for your business. While you may not have the power to avoid negative reviews online, you can take the steps to protect your online reputation by bringing in professional help.