In a world where over 4.6billion people globally use social media, brand reputation is important and should be one of your businesses top priorities.

However, especially for smaller businesses, this can be a very daunting time consuming job that needs planning and a good strategy to improve and maintain your brand reputation online.

What is online brand reputation?

Your online reputation is the image your brand and business that anyone going onto your website and social media will see. Social Media is arguably the best online platform to build your brand reputation (as well as loose it). Unlike a website, your social media platforms by their very design are very much more personal and interactive with the people visiting your brand online.

Having a good reputation will influence your brand & businesses visibility and credibility. Simply put, every piece of content your brand publishes online, be it on your website, social media or public forums helps you attract potential new customers and keep existing ones, which in turn effect your businesses finances.

How social media management contributes to your brand reputation?

Social Media is increasingly becoming peoples go to source of information, and even used as a search engine like Google, especially when searching for local businesses.

Customers to your brand/business can go beyond your basic review, using social media by uploading content they have produced themselves, such as video, talking about and showing products from your brand. This can of course be very positive, or very negative and either way will effect your businesses finances.

These are the top five steps brands need to follow to ensure both their brand and employee social media profiles are protected from posting mavericks.

1: Build a Social Media Policy

You might be thinking, ‘why do I need a Social Media Policy?’ Well… Think about it this way, if you and your employees don’t know what is and isn’t acceptable online, then how will you & your employees know if the content being posting online is acceptable? Creating a social media policy will structure guidelines of what is acceptable or not.

A social media policy will hold employees accountable for their behaviour and creates awareness for social media as a legitimate tool for business.

Having a social media policy will give clarity to your employees, giving them a better understanding of your brands social sharing. They will also feel more empowered to promote your brands message on social media.

So what topics should your social media policy cover? Here are a few topics that should be included.

• Brand vision and voice
• Goals of social media for the organisation
• Roles (ie: which departments/titles/offices can and cannot post)
• Rules, Privacy, and Regulations that must be followed
• Consequences and legal risks

Does your business need a Social Media Policy? At MB Media Global, we can create a social media policy for your business. Click HERE for more information.

2: Develop an Approval Process & Team

Depending on the size of your business, you may feel you have the staffing power to do this in house, or you may just feel that outsourcing this task to a business such as here at MB Media Global is your best option.

The benefit of using a company such as ours, is that you will get the expertise of knowing how structure a clear and simple policy and make suggestions of who within your company should oversee your corporate social media policy, review posts and any issues that may arise.

Understanding what sort of content needs to be approved as well as how long it will take to approve content is important. This will need good communication between your various departments involved in your brands content online such as PR & Marketing teams, be it in-house or outsourced PR & Marketing teams so that schedules for social media campaigns and events can be planned smoothly with plenty of time to create content, get legal sign-off, and approval from whoever manages your social media.

3: Implement Social Listening

87,000 tweets are posted every minute, so keeping track of what is being said about your brand on social media can potentially be tough to keep on top of all mentions reference to your brand. So just imagine how many posts, comments, reviews and messages are posted across all other social media platforms.

This is where social listening tools come into play. Remove the detective work by employing technology that does the sleuthing for you. Employ a person or team to handle any negative feedback that’s returned.

In addition to catching potential red flags or full-blown trolls, social media listening tools can also identify happy customers that can be repurposed into testimonials as well as help to identify trends and topics in your industry. This is invaluable knowledge for both your social media and content teams.

4: Leverage Social Safeguards & Employee Advocacy Platforms

Make it easy and safe for employees to share on social media. This is where technology can really shine. If you want your employees to share then make it easy for them. Employee Advocacy platforms like are available to create one central repository of content (all pre-approved) that employees can easily share in a few clicks. It will guide them on what content they should be fuelling their feeds with, ideas on what makes a good post caption as well as guardrails should they accidentally cross the line.

All brands (especially those in regulated industries) will have types of content and lists of terms that cross brand and regulatory lines. Often, these can be innocuous terms that employees may not even realise. Leveraging technology to showcase what is a limited term or stop a post from being shared should it contain something deemed unacceptable keeps the horse in the barn versus having a Social Media Manager and Compliance team have to handle some quick clean up.

5: Have a Crisis Plan

Even the most thought-out plans and technologies cannot prevent everything. There may be a day when an angry employee lets loose or a photo with hidden details slips through. In addition to the our four pre-emptive steps above, there should also be a plan to handle a social media crisis. Controversies happen and covering them up often creates more of a mess. The key to social media is, to be honest, and brief. Address the issues, what the resolution will be, and who needs to be involved.

While mistakes do happen, these social media glitches can often be avoided with the proper policies, procedures, and technologies all working together to make your brand shine on social. Following these 5 steps will help to keep your social media from being sabotaged internally and/or externally and your brand positive.