Self Storage Business Owners – Manage Your Online Reputation

The rising use of services like Google Places, Google Maps, and social networks have made it more important than ever to concern yourself with online reputation management. There are an increasingly larger number of consumers posting reviews on various customer satisfaction sites like Yelp, Google Places, and Yahoo! Local and their integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter make it easy for customers to share their bad business experiences. Add in the soaring number of blogger-written reviews influencing thousands of readers, demonstrating the supreme importance of controlling your online reputation.

Review sites and their user-created content often appear on the first page of search engine results, making them a significant target for online reputation management. Positive comments are always welcome but a negative comment can wreak havoc on your business. Being proactive about online reputation management protects your bottom line. For more detailed information, a detailed two-step process of implementation and best management practices is presented below.

Listen To Your Customer Base

As a business owner, you are busy and perhaps do not have time to peruse every review site, social network, and blog that mentions or reviews your business. However, monitoring what is being said online is the only way to listen to your business. There are a few tools available to help you streamline the monitoring process.

Set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts offers a simple and free way to find out what is being said about you online. Have your managers sign up, pick pertinent keywords, like your business name or that of your competitor, decide how often you wish to receive the alert, what types of content to search, and Google sends an email when the keywords are mentioned in a blog, news article, or other web content.

Buy software or enroll with a management service. Many software programs available for purchase offer a more in-depth method to track what is being said about your self storage business online. Additionally, there are reputation management applications and tools you can use for managing and overseeing social media mentions. Software services and reputation management tools are both designed to cultivate customer interactions, track engagement across various platforms, and provide feedback on where improved management is needed.

Respond and Engage

A fast, professional response to online remarks about your self-storage business impacts whether you end up with good PR or a negative PR experience. Engaging and connecting with individual tenants where they are online is the most direct and effective response.

The tone you respond with is just as critical to the timeliness with which you respond to negative reviews. Avoid further alienating your tenants with overtly defensive responses or obvious self-serving marketing or sales-driven pitches.

As the amount of online social sharing increases, managing your online reputation is an important aspect of your online presence. Having guidelines for engagement and responses in place help make sure your self-storage business reflects your company values online.