Twitter is a great tool for you to use if you want to repair your company’s reputation, as you will find out if you read through the Twitter feed for reputation.com. It is a powerful social media tool that, despite limiting you to 144 characters, gives you the ability to contact all of your followers in mere seconds. You can connect with people quickly and efficiently, giving them information that they want. This has been used to spread the word about new sales or products, but it can also be used when your reputation is slipping and you want to fight back against it to make it strong once more.
Watch Your Own Posts
The first thing to do is to make sure that you never post anything that could be negative on your own Twitter. You want this to be professional. It represents your business. Many individual users may use the site for things that are decidedly unprofessional, but that is because they do not have a reputation to uphold. It does not matter if they anger or offend people. You never want to do anything that could be seen as offensive in any way, and so all of your posts – even the ones that clearly seem to be fine – should be screened by a number of people on your social media team before they are send out to the public.
Posts are Final
You have to remember that you can never take anything back on the Internet. Once you post it, it is there for good. Even if you delete the tweet just seconds later, someone could take a screen shot of it and post it on the Internet for all to see. You always need to assume that people are going to be able to read what you say forever, so it all needs to be very positive.
Respond to Critics
To repair your reputation, you can use your Twitter account to respond to people who are being critical of your company. For example, if you run a cable television company and there is a service outage, people are going to vent about it online. You should use this as a chance to tell them what progress has been made and to answer their questions. Show them that you are working on getting everything set up the right way.
You can also respond to people who may be saying unfounded negative things about your company. For instance, you might run a hotel that is getting a lot of negative comments about it on Twitter. However, some of the comments could be blatant lies. You can respond so that people who read the comments also see your responses that explain what happened. People will often complain about things that are their fault, not yours, and you need to point this out so that other people realize where the blame lies and take this into account when they are choosing a hotel for themselves – or any other business, for that matter.
Keep It Civil
While you do this, it is incredibly important not to take anything personally. You always need to keep your responses civil, even when other people are being angry and abusive. Maintain your composure. It is often good to have the whole team in on it, rather than just one person, so that you do not quickly and emotionally tweet something that you are going to regret in the future.
Remove Untrue Attacks
As mentioned, some of the attacks might be based on lies that people are telling for a variety of reasons. If so, you want to work with a company that can have those attacks removed from Twitter. It is unfair for your business to suffer because other users are telling lies. There is a lot that you can do to get these things taken down so that they do not impact business.
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