How Doctors Can Protect Their Online Reputation

Updated on September 27, 2019

As a medical professional, it is very important to manage your online reputation. This is because digital reputation is everything in today’s connected world. People believe what they see online regardless of whether it is true or false. 

Therefore, it is good to manage the online reputation of your practice to know what people online are saying about your business. Doing this will help you ensure that your practice a good reputation online. This article will help you manage your online reputation by giving you tips for managing your practice’s online reputation.

Tips for Managing Your Business’s Online Reputation

Protecting your online reputation should be pre-emptive and you should either do it yourself or utilise a doctor reputation management company to help you do so. You should also perform the following:

Search for Your Business Online At Least Once a Month

If you search for your business after every few months or once a year, you may not respond to negative reviews as soon as possible or know what people are saying about your business. This is because many people are writing reviews online on a regular basis in social media, blogs and online review sites. 

It is a good idea to search for your business on search engines such as Google at least once a month to know all that people are saying about your business. Apart from search engines, you should check industry-related community websites for any mentions since some mentions only show up on these sites. An automatic alert or RSS feed can help you track this information. 

Google Alerts can let you monitor your web and social media mentions by informing you when your name is mentioned online. You can create an alert by going to the Google Alerts homepage and typing in your name in the “Create an alert about…” box. You can choose to receive email alerts whenever your name appears on a daily basis or weekly.

Claim Your Business Profile

Nowadays, many people use the internet to conduct business and provide information. These people include your potential customers and clients. As such, it is a good idea to claim your profile online and on all social media sites. Even if you don’t plan to use twitter for business, make a twitter handle for your business before someone else registers a twitter handle with the same name.

Have an Online Reputation Management Policy in Place and Make Someone Responsible For the Management

It is good to have a policy and consistent process in place when it comes to managing your online reputation as online chatter is constant. Determine the customer service actions that should be taken across all the channels and make the monitoring of these channels part and parcel of your company policy. 

If you work in a large business environment, make someone responsible for monitoring these channels and responding according to the company’s policy. Ensure that this person knows the ins and outs of social networking.

Distribute Your Content

Businesses that yield few results online are almost the same as those businesses with negative reviews. For a customer to buy from a business, he or she has to trust the business offering the product or service. A customer needs information about a business and what it offers. So, if you don’t provide any information, you could end up turning off potential customers. 

Provide information on your social networking sites, your site and through press releases to make it easy for your target audience to find information about your brand and what you have to offer. This information can help improve your search engine results as it increases your online visibility.

Social media can also help you promote yourself as an expert as it allows you to create and share content. So, consider taking advantage of this. For instance, you can take part in LinkedIn Group discussions related to your industry and answer questions on twitter. Whenever you create content, share it both on these profiles and on Facebook.

Use a Professional Software Solution

A software solution can monitor and clean up your online presence. As such, it may be a good idea to consider investing in it. This service is an all-in-one platform for online review management, local search visibility and social media meant for businesses. Besides, they provide a service that enables you to measure the performance of your business against your competitors.

It is very important to know what people are saying about you online. Search your business online and ensure that you have lots of positive content online.

+ posts

Throughout the year, our writers feature fresh, in-depth, and relevant information for our audience of 40,000+ healthcare leaders and professionals. As a healthcare business publication, we cover and cherish our relationship with the entire health care industry including administrators, nurses, physicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, and more. We cover a broad spectrum from hospitals to medical offices to outpatient services to eye surgery centers to university settings. We focus on rehabilitation, nursing homes, home care, hospice as well as men’s health, women’s heath, and pediatrics.