Managing Your Reputation Online
I was interviewed by WCCO TV reporter Jennifer Mayerle earlier this month for a segment about who Googles you and what you can to do to present yourself in the best possible light online.
Created a positive online image is as much about content marketing and personal branding as anything.
6 Tips To Help You Manage Your Reputation Online
Here are some essential things you need to think about to successfully manage your reputation online.
1) What Is Your Expertise?
Decide what it is you want to be known for and build your personal brand around that. This, of course, is something you’ll have to figure out on your own.
It doesn’t have to be one single thing but whatever it is, you should be passionate about it in order to maintain your interest and for it to be sustainable over the long haul.
2) Dot-Com Yourself
Buy your domain name. Use it to host your professional credentials, including your work history and a portfolio of examples of your work, and, ideally, a blog.
3) Start A Blog
A blog gives you a publishing platform that you control and through which you can create content that will likely show up when people search for your name.
Publishing your own blog allows you demonstrate your topical expertise and by doing so, build your personal brand.
It also provides content you can share via your social media accounts.
4) Position Yourself On Social Media
Having active social media accounts will often show up prominently in search results for individuals’ names.
At the very least, you should have a LinkedIn profile that is filled out completely, because if you do, your LinkedIn profile is the most likely of all the social sites to rank highly when someone searches your name.
Twitter is also a great social channel for showing up in search results, in no small part due to the deal it has struck to provide Google all of its data. If you choose to use Twitter, the key to making it work is to use it actively. Having an account that is largely dormant will not help.
Facebook & Instagram
While Facebook and Instagram accounts will show up in name searches, they are not nearly as effective as LinkedIn and Twitter because there is typically far less text for search engines to read. Instagram is mostly a visual channel and Facebook accounts are usually not entirely public.
5) Share Your Expertise On Social Media
To get the most out of your social channels in and of themselves as well as in terms of search visibility, you need to actively use them.
Ideally, you would post status updates to them daily. That doesn’t have to be as daunting as it might sound. By using a social media management tool like Hootsuite, you can post simultaneously to multiple social channels.
I schedule links to stories I find interesting to post throughout the day to both my Twitter account and my LinkedIn profile. I also use Hootsuite’s mobile app to post links I find throughout the day, as I find them.
In addition to the third-party links I share, I will also post links to my own content.
Because I’m posting links to articles about my industry, it helps position me as an expert in my field. This also makes it much more likely that people will follow me because I’m sharing interesting content.
Finally, the frequent activity demonstrates to Google that my social media accounts are active, which helps my accounts and posts to be more likely to show up in searches for my name.
6) Monitor Yourself
Finally, you should be consistently monitoring the search results for mentions of your name.
You can do this by setting up Google Alerts for variations of your name. After you set up the alerts, you’ll get an email whenever new content appears in Google’s search results that mention your name.
It’s also a good idea to set up “saved searches” for your name in Twitter and LinkedIn and check those routinely.
