Building and Boosting Your Online Reputation

Social media and technology have given you a gift. They have allowed you to create your reputation (for personal and professional use) online so that you can successfully increase revenue for your business. Leveraging the online tools is key.

There are many ways in which you can successfully build your reputation online. The generation of large amounts of content, through blogs, videos, etc, are some of the most effective ways to accomplish that. It is important to remember, however, that your reputation will not be built up overnight. It takes time and the consistent involvement of other people.

• Be focused: Identify your niche and concentrate your social media efforts on discussions and content that is related to your area of expertise. Focusing your brand is very important to your ultimate success. Make sure that your content and your discussions have a consistent thread running through them.
   
• Pay attention: Make sure to pay close attention to discussions that are related to your business. You will learn a great deal from what you read and from what you participate in. One of the main keys to social media success is listening.
   
• Show that you can be trusted: If you want to build a solid reputation online, honesty is a very large and important part of it. It is absolutely imperative that you demonstrate transparency at all times in business (and in life). Of course, this also applies to your involvement with social media.
   
• Be genuine: Your content should reflect who you are as a human being. If you write canned corporate jargon, people will not buy into what you are offering or into you as a person. People need to relate to you on a human level.
   
• Avoid self-promotion at all cost: If your content is full of the hard sell, nobody will have an interest in reading what you have to say. If your content is valuable and solves your readers’ problems and you are unobtrusive and respectful, people will be interested in getting involved in your offerings.
   
• Make sure that your content has meaning: When you are sharing your content with others, it must be valuable to them. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to read it. Additionally, if you don’t offer valuable content, your readers will not share it with other people whom they know.
   
• Respond in a timely fashion: A very large part of building your online reputation successfully is your interactions with other people. You will never be able to build your reputation without other people. You are not in a silo.
   
• Share other people’s content: Of course, a very large part of your successful reputation depends on how much people are willing to share what you are sharing with them. Along with that, goes the idea that you are also expected to share their content with people you know. One hand definitely washes the other in this case.
   
• Don’t be controlling: Even though you own the content that you have written and published, it is important for you to be able to relinquish some of that control so that your content, discussions, etc, can be syndicated across the Internet. Your reputation will go nowhere without it. You need to allow other people to share what you write. After all, it will certainly carry far more weight if the syndication comes from them than you.
   
• Get as involved as possible: Remember that you should not be spending all of your time on one social media channel. The more involved you get with social media communities on various websites, the stronger your reputation will be.

Conclusion

Boosting your online reputation takes time and effort. Once you have established a consistent pattern of connecting with others online, you will see your reputation flourish and more and more people will want to be a part of your social media network for business. As always, it is all about building and maintaining relationships.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.