A recent article featured on Huffington Post’s blog titled, “4 Steps to Managing Your Small Business’ Online Reputation,” discusses why it is important for business owners to worry about their online reputations.

“Since 90 percent of customers say their buying is influenced by online reviews, you’d better make sure your online reputation, in reviews and other places, is as positive as possible,” writes Jonha Revesencio in the blog post.

Revesencio lists four steps for managing a business’ online reputation:

• Facebook. To properly manage your business’ online reputation, you need to focus on your Facebook page, recommends Warren Cardinal of Lucid Crew Web Design in the blog post. “Currently Facebook has over 1.44 billion active viewers per month,” adds Revesencio. “Your target marketing audience is in there somewhere and consumers are on it like white on rice. Besides, it’s still a free venue.”
• Respond to bad reviews. It is important to address your unhappy customers. A few ways to deal with bad reviews, provided by Young Entrepreneur’s Council in the blog post, include: making sure you fully understand the problem before responding, using unhappy customers’ feedback to discover how to improve your product/service and always making sure to ask the customer, “What do you want me to do for you?”
• Get on Instagram. Mobile users are on the rise, and Instagram currently has more than 75 million daily users. You can use this to your advantage by posting “positive, upbeat images — the trendier and funnier, the better.” Revesencio recommends other social media outlets like SnapChat and Vimeo. “Remember, the only real way to control your online reputation is to represent yourself, rather than have strangers doing it for you,” she adds in the post.
• Make your business reputation personal, not private. Consumers do not want an anonymous person/group of people to sell them something; they want an individual, asserts Revesencio. It is important for businesses to protect this individual who represents their product/service. Create a positive identity for the “face” of your business.

Read the entire Huffington Post blog post on managing a business’ online reputation here.