With no shortage of online healthcare review sites, managing your company’s online reputation can be challenging. Online reviews can have a significant impact on healthcare organizations’ success or failure. According to PR Daily’s “6 tips for monitoring and managing online reviews,” seventy percent of people reading online reviews find them trustworthy. One way to manage your healthcare organization’s online reviews is by implementing a proactive online marketing strategy that includes daily monitoring of such websites.

Below are a few ways to manage online reviews for your healthcare organization:

  • Monitor the comments and reviews regularly. Positive or negative, companies need to respond to reviews as quickly as possible or else they risk appearing slow and outdated.  This is an area where many companies don’t make the investment.  If you don’t have the in-house resources, consider using a PR company to help get the ball rolling.
  • Reach out to your core audience for reviews.  Use social media to pose questions to followers asking engaging questions, take surveys and polls to find out the most important values of your audience.
  • Update your various online profiles regularly and make sure there aren’t any gaps in the information. Keeping your profile up to date helps boost the professional appearance of your company.
  • Engage your audience. Having conversations with your audience is a great way to build trust as well as increase visibility online. Incentives are a great way to engage new and casual customers, however, your regular clients can help raise your reputation.  Offering higher, exclusive incentives for reviews can help raise the reputation bar.
  • Highlight positive reviews.  Promote positive reviews by posting them prominently on your company website or sharing via social media.  Have a blog? Share the positive reviews with your followers.
  • Negative reviews need attention. It is important to address negative reviews within a short period of time.

Online reviews can be strong public relations and marketing tools. Working with a public relations firm to help manage your online presence is an investment to be considered as part of an overall communications plan.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

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