Using Social Profiles for Reputation Management

Social profiles like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Workfu, Flickr, Carbonmade, Quora, etc., are often great for ranking above a negative listing. There are literally thousands of sites like this that will allow you to create a profile. Some are better than others, some will rank in the search engines naturally while others will require a lot of work just to get them to show up.

Here are a few steps that can help with your reputation management problems.

1. Build your social profiles.

Pick 10-20 sites (we do 50 as a starting point), register for each of them and put up a picture and unique content on each profile page. If you have a company or personal website, you can put a link to that site in each of the profiles. Most will have a section for a URL or link back to your site.

2. Start marketing those profiles.

Once the profile pages are created, you still need to get these properties to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You can either wait to see what happens, or start building links to the properties. Buying or building links is a completely different process that takes a lot of experience to do correctly. The links you are building and buying are to get these profile pages indexed and hopefully get them to start ranking.

3. Wait and See vs Taking Action.

When we start working with a new client, it’s almost impossible to know which social profile will rank first. Our goal with social profiles is to build an abundance, build a few links to each of them and then wait to see if any of them rank high in the SERPs. Profiles that rank on pages 1-3 will get more links to push them onto the first page. Profiles that are now on the first page but below the negative will get more links to push it above the negative listing.

4. Moving on from social profiles.

For most SunriseReputation clients, social profiles are not enough to complete the job. Assuming that is going to be true, we do a lot more than social profiles. When the work first starts, we do about 10 blog posts on domains that we own. Once these blog posts are completed we immediately start building links to the blog posts. The blog post strategy will be discussed in greater detail in a future post.

Social profiles are a great starting point in reputation management, but they are never enough. In order to control the top 10 SERPs and make sure it’s protected, you need a nice mixture of different types of sites. Variety ensures that future Google updates won’t shift the top 10 and leave you back where you started.