Promote Your Brand Through Facebook's Timeline Promotions

Not long ago, Facebook forced companies to use third-party platforms for promotions. Now, businesses are allowed to use such marketing campaigns directly through their timeline on Facebook. There are a handful of guidelines and regulations you should know before hosting one of your own. Here’s how to run a successful timeline contest or promotion:

As with any new project, start by setting a goal. For some businesses, the goal might be sales oriented, or to collect email addresses and contact information, or to simply boost their number of likes. Whatever your business wants to accomplish, be sure to make an outline before you start. At the end of your campaign revisit these goals and determine if you met them or not. This will help you create an effective strategy in the future.

Choose prizes and incentives that endorses your brand in unique and creative ways. Consider all your options, you can even take suggestions from your fans and hear what they’d want the prizes to be. Just be prepared to incorporate their recommendations into your previously outlined goals.

Including the correct language and image content is another important facet to your promotion. Photos on Facebook generate 53 percent more response than posts without them. So, picking the right image can really help push the success of your campaign.

Crafting an appropriate timeline promotion will only be successful if it’s in compliance with Facebook’s regulations. This includes a statement that your campaign is in no way sponsored, endorsed or associated with Facebook. A complete description of the official rules must be included.

However, if you feel such disclaimers will dissuade people from participating, the best way to work around it would be to use an app. To ensure that your fans have easy access, while also maintaining an appealing appearance, establish and advertise the link to your promotion app. You can also use specialized applications to collect and review data from your promotion.

Gaining likes on Facebook can be difficult, and often beyond the help of a promotion. Centel Media, the leading online reputation management company, can help you gain more likes for little cost. With their new social media optimization service, Centel Media™ can boost the effectiveness of your Facebook page, so your brand can be recognized and your overall online presence improved.

In order to utilize Facebook’s new timeline promotions, and draw more attention to your business’s page, it’s important to understand how it all works and what Facebook requires of you.

Loose Lips Sinks Ships...and Your Online Reputation

What’s uploaded online might as well be written in stone. In fact, digital messages are, in many ways, more permanent than stone. Every detail, phone number, joke, opinion, post, tweet, comment (the list goes on) is saved online, archived, and accessible to anyone. Slips of the tongue, or in this case fingers on the keyboard, could result in an offensive remark that will isolate a portion of your audience or clientele, and inevitably injure your chances of success online.

If managed correctly, this spreading of information can provide ample opportunity for any online interest. Unfortunately, human error occurs all too often and the brand’s reputation is what pays the price. It’s essential to keep a close eye on what’s posted, no matter who posted it. You must remember that you’re not the only one representing your interests, but everyone, whose name ties back to you, becomes a part of your brand’s appearance, and can ruin it all the same.

Being considerate of what you post on social media is common business knowledge by this point, but even inter-office emails, newsletters, and text messages are open-season for PR missteps and each should be managed appropriately. Before publishing something, ask yourself, “how would I react if this post made the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper?” Is it something you want your entire professional network to read? If the answer is no, then don’t post it to the Web.

If you do make a mistake and publish something regrettable,  Centel Media™ offers negative suppression services. While these mistakes can never be completely removed, they can be forced further down the search result pages, essentially archiving them, and making them more difficult to find. Search engines and social media feeds only show the most current and relevant results, and with  Centel Media™, you can use this to your advantage.

Centel Media™s staff of creative writers and literary professionals will write content for result pages that reflects the true value of your brand name. Don’t abandon a piece of your audience by allowing detrimental material to stay floating on top of search results. Take action and protect your reputation. Just because you had loose lips in a comment or tweet, doesn’t mean it has to completely sink the ship of your online reputation.

In managing your online reputation, remember that all material is permanent and trackable. Maintain your reputation by censoring what you post.

Stay Alert Of Your Online Reputation

Worldwide public conversation has spread so deep across the Internet, it’s nearly impossible to know how far. Whether the discussion is about trending global news, or reviews of local businesses, millions of people express their opinions via websites over the Internet. This constant dialogue is critical to any online interest; however, monitoring this stream can become overwhelming.

The minute-by-minute information pouring in, the free-flowing conversations, it’s all incredibly taxing to handle alone. But, there are options and tools to help anyone gauge the success of their marketing campaign, or the response to a new product, by monitoring discussions of their brand that sprout up online. Email alerts can notify you when your name appears, or, if you so choose, track the success of your competitor. Either way, you get results on topics that are essential to your brand.

To begin setting up email alerts, input a specific search phrase. If your term is too generalized, you’ll end up buried in results. You can enter several keywords as an alert, so narrow your focus. But, at the same time, you should try to maintain a balance. A search too narrow or too specific could hinder your results as well.

You need to include terms that are widely used in the public. Alerts are derived from keywords found over the Internet, so if you think it’s a term people wouldn’t likely use, it probably won't yield any results. Keep it simple and directed to you or your business.

When creating your alerts, make sure to follow the procedure of the site you’re using. You may need to place your brand’s name within quotation marks, or include additional words to narrow your search. Some sites will suggest other tactics, like incorporating a minus sign to filter results. Once your alerts are established, any mention of your name will trigger an email to be sent directly to your account.

Specify how often you receive these alerts. It’s not enough to simply set alerts in place and then forget to check them for three months. Restrict the alerts to once a week, once a day, or select the “as-it-happens” option, whichever works best around your schedule.

If you or your brand’s name isn’t appearing as frequently as you’d like, then perhaps Centel Media™ search engine optimization services can help you gain a better footing online.

When managing your online reputation, the first step is knowing the extent of your online presence. Creating specific email alerts for your brand will streamline the process of monitoring the overwhelming abundance of information online.

Drive Home With A New Online Presence

Gone are the days of door-to-door salesmen. Now we’re in the era of virtual salesmanship, where first impressions are often established online. A car salesman may still practice the same techniques he did fifty years ago, giving away turkeys with each vehicle purchased during the holiday season, but nowadays, if such marketing campaigns aren’t broadcast on social networking sites, those turkeys may rot in the company freezer.

There are some practical methods your dealership can implement to ensure your online reputation matches the good (honest, patient, friendly) appearance that your staff promises to uphold in person. First, you should look up your brand on search engines. See what sites potential customers are visiting, and if you find something questionable or offensive related to your dealership, take action to remove it immediately. In some areas of the internet, removal is impossible. Centel Media™ negative suppression services can fix such problems by rearranging the search results so your dealership's name isn’t linked to slanderous material.  

As a business minded individual, it’s important to promote and encourage customer interaction. This includes testimonies, reviews and comments. Think along the lines of those old-school suggestion boxes, only replaced by the instant power of social networking tools such as Facebook comments and Tweets. Centel Media™ can help your dealership establish and build a following on your social networking site with Social Media Optimization.

Even though your social media pages belong to you or your dealership, don’t forget that anything you write will be viewed by the public. When you are working to build an online reputation, be careful about posting personal, political, or religious messages that are inappropriate for a professional business. Centel Media™ has a highly knowledgeable staff of writers to create blog postings for your website and press releases.

Take advantage of all that Centel Media, the top-rated online reputation management company, has to offer you and your dealership. Bring your business into the fast-paced and ever-growing reality of social media with Centel Media™ online reputation development tactics. These services will increase foot traffic to your lots and lead to a positive growth in what matters most -- car sales.

Maintaining a good online reputation could lead any car dealership to a highly profitable fall season.

Expand Awareness of Your Business With Wikipedia

All businesses should take advantage of the tools available to them online. Wikipedia can be an enormous asset, encouraging knowledge of your brand. However, creating a page can be difficult and tedious.  Centel Media™ can create content on Wikipedia that will improve public awareness of your business.

Wikipedia gains half its traffic from search engines, and appears on the first page of results in 95% of all Google searches. It’s a great opportunity to increase traffic to your site, but remember, not all businesses end up on Wikipedia’s pages. Take the time to assess the state of your business and the market you're after, because it makes all the difference to the success of your Wikipedia page.

First, it’s important to understand why people visit Wikipedia. Nearly all Wikipedia users go to the site with a desired topic already in mind. If they’re looking up your business, then they’re already familiar with your brand name and are simply looking to find more information about who you are and what you do. Wikipedia is a good way to raise awareness of your business, but it shouldn’t be used by companies with low visibility. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to be a celebrity or big-time corporation to use Wikipedia, it just means that your market needs to be accessible, something within the public eye, or else it won’t be noticed.

It may seem that Wikipedia favors large businesses, but in reality it just favors better-known companies. If your online presence is low, your best course of action is to build up a reputation over the Internet before committing to a Wikipedia page. Creating a ‘better known’ company or brand can be taxing, but with the help of a reputation management company, it’s possible to gain a wider audience. After constructing a stronger foundation online, a Wikipedia page can then be utilized to its full potential.

Centel Media™, the leading online reputation management company, works with individuals and businesses alike to create content for Wikipedia, along with other social media outlets. Centel Media™ writers create Wiki pages with legitimate sources and provide links in order to give your potential customers and clients more information about your company. You may be hesitant about creating a page in Wikipedia, and feel your other social media sites are enough, but keep in mind that if you wait, your competitors may beat you to it. With today’s tough economy, it would be wise to take any opportunity to get ahead. Centel Media™ team of trained professionals will help you create an official Wikipedia submission that can draw more attention to your brand.

Wikipedia is a great resource for business development. However, it may be daunting to start a Wiki page on your own. Maximize your online potential by using Centel Media’s Wikipedia Page Submission services.  

Blog Your Way To Success

There are many reasons to start a blog. Maybe you want share your experiences, write reviews or promote your brand. No matter the reason, writing original, creative content will help improve your blog and earn a greater presence online.

Creating a blog worth reading is the easy part, finding an audience that will actually read your blog is what’s hard, and it’s not going to happen over night. The first step in effective blog creation is finding a blogger who is knowledgeable and passionate about the subject. This may or may not be you, but in either case, it’s crucial to have a blogger with these prerequisites. Ones that do, find it much easier to write interesting posts.

When creating your blog, keep in mind that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.  Use the tools available to you. Research other, successful blogs similar to your subject and take notes on the aspects that make them accessible and popular.

Just going through the motions of writing won’t make your blog successful. Your content needs to be interesting, something that will lure people into coming back. The easiest way to ensure a solid, long-lasting blog is to use a theme that has a wide pool of information to draw from, so that your material never grows stale.

Write your blogs with authority, be persuasive, but don’t act pompous or overconfident. Doing so will only alienate you from your reader. Address your audience with the respect they deserve and be appreciative that they are spending their time reading your blog instead of the other 100 blogs on the same subject.

The main goal of your writing should be to continue providing value to your readers as time goes on. Most blogs are momentary, they focus on fashion, breaking news, gossips or trending gadgets. That type of writing draws a big crowd, until the moment is over and their blog becomes obsolete. Don’t focus on that type of content style, redirect your focus on creating a blog with substance, something that contributes not only to your brand but your industry or interest as a whole.

If your blog is lacking and you need help, there are services available to do the work for you. Centel Media™ offers blog creation service at an affordable price.

Blogging is a great way to gain recognition from the public. If you know how to write blogs effectively, you can reach out to new people and expand your audience.

Delta Needs A New Dawn

Among the top 100 acclaimed businesses, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are tied at number one for being the most recognizable and respected. The major American airline, Delta, is considered one of the least respected. It’s not the difference in industry that contributes to this gap, but the way these companies have handled their public affairs in the past.

PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are two of the largest corporations in the world. Both have a long history and, over the course of time, have gained experience tackling crises. But experience hasn’t helped Delta, they too have a long history. So why is Delta the one with the poor public image? The brand does have a fairly high level of brand recognition, but the overall perception of the company remains negative. Well, it boils down to how their public image is reflected in their marketing campaigns.

One aspect of proper online reputation management is through the use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. While Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have a solid standing online, Delta, on the other hand, is lacking. The inactivity of Delta in social media isn’t the only reason why customers dislike the brand, but it could be a tool they can use to improve their image. Social media may provide the jumpstart they need to redirect their brand’s online reputation.

Social media sites have made it possible for large corporations and brands, such as Coca-Cola, to connect with millions of people on a daily basis. Making the most of these sites is crucial for success in any industry. If a company wishes to survive today’s tough market, then they must grab at any chance to build their online presence.  

Taking advantage of social media can be the difference between having some publicity and having strong publicity.  Brand reputation management companies, such as Centel Media™, offer social media optimization to any online group or individual. In order to optimize a client’s social media page, Centel Media™ web experts can promote you or your brand, helping to attract the necessary number of likes and followers needed to grow an audience on Facebook and Twitter. With a newfound fan base, you can publish content to social media sites and feel confident that it will be seen.  Once a following is established, it’s up to you to create strong, memorable content that can positively influence how you’re perceived online.

Establishing a reputable and recognizable brand name is now easier with the help of social media sites. Brands lacking in customer satisfaction should reevaluate their presence online.

4 Tips For Online Success

In our daily ‘feed’ of social media, there are endless lists of tips and advice, shortcuts and reminders that we bookmark to read later, we skim over the headlines to gather the “gist” of the article, and never really give it a second glance. We see tips on subjects like “how to organize your closet for maximum space potential,” or “the best advice when meeting your partner’s parents.” These are topics you may read out of slight interest, and never really take seriously. But when it comes to managing your online presence, especially if your livelihood depends on it, then it’s key to take these few tips into consideration:

Remember -- It Always Starts Offline

Complaints towards your brand name originate in the real world. Even if you’re a virtual company, and all correspondence takes place online, the root of the problem, and the fuel that keeps it burning, is always the person behind it. Things that are aired online, are aired by someone who experienced something real and are expressing it in a virtual way.

Stay in the Loop

Whatever the problem may be, don’t ignore it!  As they say, ‘knowledge is power.’ If you don’t stay in the know about your own brand and your own reputation, how are you supposed to defend it if and when it comes under attack? How are you supposed to address your audience if you don’t have all the information they have? Do your research, and keep up to date.

Know When to Respond

As with the previous tip, don’t ignore! You should always respond, but don’t underestimate the importance of proper timing. Jumping into a conversation or comment thread out of anger will accomplish you nothing. Let it settle so you can look at it objectively.

Promote Yourself

Last but not least, promote your name. Be proactive and diligent about spreading the good word about your brand. Don’t be shy or embarrassed about tooting your own horn, if you don’t do it, no one else will.

These are just four things you can do to manage your online reputation, but there are countless others. Centel Media™ is a company that offers solutions to all your online reputation management needs, no matter how deep-rooted the issue may be.

The correct steps to online success are doable, but not always easy. Keep these tips in mind  when approaching the management of your reputation.

Don't Be Mugged by Mugshots

It’s tough to be brought down by negative images after all you’ve done to improve your personal or professional reputation. There are dozens of websites specializing in and promoting such images, whose sole purpose is to perpetuate mugshots and other slanderous material centered around any given individual, whether they are guilty of a crime or not.

For many affected by sites like these, options are limited. It’s not as simple as contacting the webmaster and requesting they remove the negative image. Some websites will flat out refuse to take it down. Others will charge astronomical fees, claim they’ll take it down, and then continue to display it anyway. Companies and individuals have gone to great legal lengths to have negative images removed, only to hit an impasse.

Images are more dangerous than written articles or reviews, simply due to their accessibility. They can spread quickly over the Internet, seen by a countless number of people in a very short amount of time. Any random individual can take your image and use it to promote negative publicity about you or your brand. These images need to be handled so interested parties don’t see you for something other than what you truly are. Often, when you use a search engine to research your online presence, you tend to find images that are copyrighted or used illegally without your authorization.

Images used without your permission can have a very large impact on the way people view you or your company. Centel Media™ offers a service in negative image suppression. Our team of experts will suppress any image for you, and all you need is access to the image in question. Our loyal employees here at Centel Media™ will investigate the image and make sure no one else has the rights to use it. Then, we will contact the person who stole your image and work to take the image down.

The professionals at Centel Media™ also create original images for you or your company to use in order to create favorable publicity in hopes of reaching more potential clients. We post fresh, positive images, and work to ensure they can be seen first in keyword searches. With the help of Centel Media™, the negative images will be suppressed and buried under images you choose to properly represent your interests.

Inappropriate images can severely and negatively impact your online reputation. Centel Media™ offers you suggestions and solutions to remove these images from the public eye.

Weather the Storm of a Negative Online Reputation

There is no way to remove negative reviews about your brand once they're uploaded online. However, there are ways you can handle them. If you want to improve your online reputation, you need to know the appropriate response to such situations and how to contain them. With the right tools, you can take back control of your online presence.

You can’t stop the rain from falling, but you can use an umbrella. The same mentality applies to your online reputation: you cannot stop bad reviews, but you can protect yourself. The range of damage that can occur from negative online reviews has just as many possible variations as a brewing rain storm. It could be one small comment that takes little effort to contain, or it could be a flood of negative reviews that take thousands of dollars and months of hard work to repair. This widespread damage isn't unusual, it’s a result of the growing number of platforms that allow people to express their displeasure online.

The first step in damage control is measurement. Measuring rain can be as simple as placing a bucket outside on a stormy day. The same is true in monitoring your online reputation, it’s as simple as being involved, collecting the data, and observing what is being said about your brand. Join industry-specific social networking sites. While Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are absolute musts, industry-specific sites will be just as beneficial.

Unfortunately, you may have the strong desire to fight for your reputation, taking strides to battle back against negative reviews. While it's important to respond and confront negative reviews, doing so the wrong way may come off as unprofessional, which can then encourage further activity around that particular situation, and thus push its ranking higher on search engines. The best way to discourage and combat negativity is with positivity.

Centel Media™ offers services in all areas of online reputationmanagement, including negative review suppression. To decrease the influence of such reviews, Centel Media™ works tirelessly to create an abundance of positive reviews to outshine the negative.

There's no way to stop any negativity from reaching you or your business, but Centel Media™ can provide you with options to prevent damage and rescue your reputation. For more information on negative review suppression, click here.

To recover an online reputation, you must tread lightly. Know which actions  you should take and which you shouldn't.

Courtney Fisher,

Assistant Press Secretary

Centel Media™

Free ORM Services May Not Be So Free After All

Anyone serious about expanding their business also needs to be serious about marketing.

This includes exploring new ways to promote their product, researching outlets in which to market, and studying the tactics of their competitors.  Today's online businesses often require strict attention to the managing, marketing and monitoring of your brand name. If your business needs to solicit the help of an online reputation management firm to maintain your public image, be wary of offers promising "free" assistance, because it may come at a much steeper cost.

72 percent of consumers read online reviews before choosing to purchase products or services from any business. That’s a large portion of your target audience, and a big number that should inspire your brand to be active in hunting for all available advantages regarding online media.  If you want to stay on top of your business's appearance, then you should take control of what your consumers are seeing. With the anonymity of online interaction, you can be in the trenches, witnessing firsthand what contributes to a consumer's judgment of your brand.

There are many options to help you with the process of managing, marketing, and monitoring your brand name. But, be wary of companies that promise “free” assistance with any of their online reputation management or marketing features. Although they may technically be free of charge, your brand could still be forced to forfeit a significant amount of personal and confidential information such as phone numbers and email addresses.

Despite any promises of "free" services a company may provide, it is never in your best interest to share confidential information online. The ‘free’ part of this reputation software, is essentially the gathering of all information associated with the keywords of your brand. Once this information is collected, a strategy must be tailored for your business. This is when the unforeseen fees and charges begin to accumulate.

Unfortunately in business, nothing is “free,” there is always a catch. If you’re not paying in cash, you are paying with your personal information, and that, in many ways, is much more valuable. Sign up with a credible reputation management company, a company who has your best interest at heart. Centel Media™ is a reputation management company based on effectively managing, monitoring and marketing the reputation of potential clients. Before partnering with any client, we carefully manage their reputation first. After we establish your desired reputation, we can then devise the appropriate marketing campaign that fits your business, which, in turn, draws traffic to your websites.

If you're interested in Centel Media™ services, visit our Products & Services page.

Watch out for online reputation management companies that offer "free" service. It may end up costing you much more than you bargained for.

Courtney Fisher Assistant Press Secretary Centel Media™