Building and Managing your Reputation on Facebook

Creating a Facebook page for your business can enhance your reputation online and give you another channel for finding and building relationships with influential bloggers, editors and reporters in your industry. In short, it’s a great tool for publicity.

Managing Your Public Image

As a business, you want your Facebook page to be searchable for the general public. That means you’ll need a plan to make a good impression and build a positive image of your business in visitors’ minds. Here are some tips to get your Facebook campaign off to a good start:

• Don’t rush into it. Create your page when you have the time to maintain and update it. An abandoned Facebook page may cause visitors to think you’ve gone out of business.
• Respond to comments, even negative ones. A negative comment isn’t a disaster if you quickly respond with a resolution to the problem. If you don’t check your page often, negative comments could sit there a long time, chipping away at your reputation.
• Avoid posting anything with an angry tone. If you’re responding to criticism (even if it’s outrageously false) maintain a neutral tone. Your anger may subside, but your response will remain on the Internet indefinitely.
• Choose your friends wisely. If you’re using a personal Facebook page for your business, remember that your friends’ reputation affects yours. Keep the tone of your interactions professional. Your clients, suppliers and potential customers will see your interactions.

Building Relationships

One benefit of using your personal Facebook page for your business is that you can build relationships with members of the media who may want to write about you or your business because personal pages allow you to connect with other users while business pages don’t. Facebook is a great way to pitch a story to a journalist. Facebook has plenty of pages for journalists. By visiting each other’s pages, you and your contacts can learn about each other and build a relationship. Once you’ve developed a relationship with a reporter or blogger, you can pitch stories that may be of interest. It’s important to note that it starts with a relationship. Just as you wouldn’t launch right into a pitch in person, it’s not polite to do so online either.