Social media has become one of the primary methods humans have of interacting with each other, for better or worse. It’s also one of the major ways we gather intel about people and businesses we’re interested in.

 All information about a particular person or company available on social media and elsewhere on the internet coalesces to form that person or business’s online reputation. Specialized teams like The Reputation Management Company exist to help clients manage their online reputations. This includes handling the damage and fallout from negative social media. 

Keep reading to find out how harmful social media can ruin your online reputation and what The Reputation Management Company can do to help improve your standing on the internet.

Why Does My Online Reputation Matter?

With so many of our interpersonal interactions online these days, your online reputation dramatically affects how potential contacts and clients view you. 

Online reputation isn’t unique to any one industry or group of people. An online reputation is significant to every individual and brand. 

Even if you don’t have a business, you need to know what people find when they search for you online. Your online reputation is derived from Facebook and LinkedIn, affecting your chances of being hired at a company. Employers regularly use search engines to research potential employees.

If you own a business, your company’s online reputation and social media engagement will help determine how customers feel about your product or services and the likelihood that they will patronize your establishment. Our phones are the first place we go these days to research businesses we might be interested in checking out, and most of us will be likely to pass on a particular store or restaurant if they have more than one bad review.

Suppose most social media coverage people can readily find about you or your business is negative. In that case, your online reputation will suffer, leading to a loss of job offers, revenue, and opportunities down the road. 

Studies also suggest that people faced with online reputation issues due to negative social media engagement are more likely to suffer from stress. To make the rebuilding process easier and more effective, you’ll need to work with a reputation management firm such as The Reputation Management Company to restore your online credit and get your image back on track.

Types of Negative Social Media

Your social media engagement can be categorized into two basic types: posts you make yourself and posts about you or your business made by others. Harmful social media in either of these categories can have drastic consequences for your online reputation. This is particularly true if the disfavorable posts are frequent or if there’s a repeating pattern or theme to the negative content posted.

Negative Engagement from Others

When other people engage negatively with your social media profiles, their actions can damage your online reputation. You may feel lost about how to react to what people say about you or your business online. Fortunately, this sort of image supervision is one of the main tasks The Reputation Management Company is here to help with.

Here are three ways other people’s engagement with your social media profiles may harm your online reputation:

1. Unflattering or negative comments or reviews. Visitors to your public profile or the business page will notice angry and unflattering reviews and comments. If there are a lot of negative reviews, this can drag down your business’s overall rating on websites like Google and Yelp.
2. Being tagged in questionable photos. You may not have control over what people post on their own social media pages. Still, you should take care not to put yourself in a situation in which compromising or professionally damaging photos of you may be taken and then posted on the internet. Such images can tank your online reputation by making you look irresponsible or untrustworthy.
3. Association with polarizing figures or ideas. Many people use social media platforms to air all sorts of ideas, from the mundane to extreme positions and philosophies. You may even keep your profile relatively uncontroversial. If you engage in destructive rhetoric or unpopular champion causes, the association could damage your online reputation.

Negative Engagement from You

Engaging with social media is one of the most important methods these days of self-promotion and interpersonal networking. But not all engagement is positive, and regular negative engagement with social media can damage the way other social media users perceive you.

Here are four ways in which you might be using social media that can be damaging to your online reputation:

1. Actively disrespecting others. This may seem obvious, but making personal attacks on other people’s social media pages reflects poorly on you. The more visible your page is, the more likely that other social media users will see your comments and form a negative opinion about your character. If you’re receiving angry or hurtful comments online, the best thing you can do is reply gracefully or just ignore them rather than responding in kind.
2. Not replying to comments. While you want to keep your replies to negative comments placid and calm, you also want to make sure you don’t neglect the positive comments you receive. If you have a history of offering radio silence to other people’s comments and inquiries, you’re sending the message that you don’t value other people’s time. Social media users who reach out to you want to know that their engagement means something to you, and if you don’t reciprocate their time and attention, your online reputation will suffer.
3. Failing to engage with other social media profiles. Social media is a reciprocal networking ecosystem, one in which members of a community are responsible for boosting and amplifying each other’s voices. You should make a regular habit of promoting other businesses and people on your own social media page. If you only ever promote your content, people will see you as self-interested, which can be damaging to your online reputation.
4. Boring posts. While it may not seem as egregious as the other three, creating dull or formulaic content can sink your online reputation just as fast as any of them. Your unique perspective and sense of humor are an asset on social media; people expect to get a sense of who you are or what your business stands for when they engage with your social media profiles. If your posts are stale, unoriginal, or sound like a robot wrote them, you’ll lose your audience.

Consequences of a Negative Online Reputation

Having a negative online reputation can be extremely damaging for both individuals and companies. News stories about people getting fired over comments on their private social media pages are relatively common. Business leaders worldwide listed damage to their reputation or brand as a top-three concern, and it’s easy to see why when you look at the severe consequences. 

A negative online reputation can close doors to you and shut you out of opportunities in your career and your social life. Damage to your reputation or brand will mean you lose customers and income for your business. It can be very dangerous to salvage the damage negative social media can inflict on your online reputation, particularly since so many knee-jerk responses to negative social media do more harm than good.

How Can The Reputation Management Company Help?

Fortunately, if you’re dealing with damage to your online reputation due to negative social media, you don’t have to weather the storm alone. Working with the top-tier agents at The Reputation Management Company will provide you with the expert advice and toolkit necessary to put out the fires from a negative social media blast and get your personal and professional reputation back on track.

If you need to downplay negative social media that may be holding you or your business back from success, get a professional team on your side who can help. Here are a few of the many ways The Reputation Management Company can improve your internet reputation:

• Removing negative content from websites such as Pissed Consumer and Yelp
• Optimizing search results to remove damaging autocomplete results
• Burying undesirable content that can’t be removed
• Improving the rankings of positive content so that they outshine any negative posts

In addition to damage control and crisis management, The Reputation Management Company also offers training and software to help clients learn to monitor their online reputation. This ensures you won’t make the same mistakes that got you into this position in the first place. 

The Bottom Line

If you’re currently facing the consequences of your online reputation due to negative social media, don’t hesitate to get the help you deserve to turn things around. You don’t want to miss out on opportunities or risk losing revenue for your business because of unflattering content on the internet. Contact The Reputation Management Company and get your online reputation rescue team assembled.