Just because you decide not to be on Twitter or Facebook, it doesn’t mean that someone else can’t post something about you on those platforms. In this Vlog, Grant sets out three things you can do to protect your reputation
If David Beckham stops buying The Sun do you think they’ll stopping writing about him?
Of course not!
But that’s exactly the same in social media. In other words, just because you decide not to be on Twitter or Facebook, it doesn’t mean that someone else can’t post something about you on those platforms.
Not being on these platforms doesn’t guarantee your reputation, in fact, it just means you have no right of reply. The fact is, people get scared of being on these platforms because we’ve all heard of scare stories that have happened to businesses.
The reality is that the problems are very small.
My advice would be to be on the platforms that your customers are on. But here are three things that you can do to protect your reputation:-
The first tip is to make sure you use social media monitoring software. In that way you know what’s being said about you. You can then decide whether to respond, to ignore, to thank people or whatever it is. Social media is a two way tool and you have to respond when people decide to write.
The second one is to direct people. In other words if you have Facebook page, don’t just invite people to make any comments because you will get any sort of comments. Rather, actually tell the people the types of comments you want. For example, what did you like best about our service? Just by asking it in a positive way, means that you direct most of your audience to give you the sort of feedback that you’re looking for.
The third tip is simply this, when there is a complaint, get it offline as quick as you can. If someone writes a comment that’s derogatory, say to them, “We want to fix this problem, could you call us on this number. Or could you private message us with a number that we can call you on.” In that way you’ve reacted and responded in a reasonable way to deal with their problem. In fact, if they carry on ranting online, they then look unreasonable because you’ve taken measures to deal with the issue.
And speaking of issues, I’m off to buy another edition of Time. Although it doesn’t seem to matter how many I buy, I still haven’t had any column inches…
There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English
