We’ve all heard the adages “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”, “ignorance is bliss”, and other. They all seem to promote a carefree attitude and that you should not worry about things that you don’t know about or aren’t prepared for. In the online world, these phrases don’t apply – in fact the opposite is true. You MUST know what is going on behind your back online when it’s your business that is in the cross-hairs.
We’ve seen it time and time again. Business owners are confounded by a drop in sales that won’t end. Your current customers are plenty happy with your service or products, but new customers just don’t seem to come in like they used to. Or even worse, maybe some of of your current customers have stopped coming in, and others have called you just to make sure you’re still open. You didn’t change anything – you still run your shop day in and day out. So why the sales slump? Here are a couple of real world examples.
Your Online Presence Indicates That You Have Closed – PERMANENTLY!
We’ve helped a shop owner out of this one before. the scenarios above fit her perfectly. Sales were dropping, customers were slowly bleeding away, and one day a customer called and asked her when she had closed down her shop. The shop owner contacted us, and we quickly found out that her Google listing was displaying her shop as PERMANENTLY CLOSED, with a big red bar indicating as such across a picture of the front of her store. No wonder new customers weren’t coming in.
No one can say who made the change, but it could have been a competitor, an angry customer, a disgruntled ex-employee, or maybe just a Google brain-fart. It doesn’t matter, though. The whole fiasco could have been avoided in the first place if she had taken the time to claim her business listing on Google (and other citation sources).
Fake Facebook Pages Created Just To Bash Your Business
Another client we’ve helped spent no time maintaining an online presence for his business. Since he didn’t, an angry customer decided to maintain one for him. She created a Facebook page for his business, and then proceeded to give him bad reviews. Facebook is making great headway into the search market, particularly for businesses that thrive on reviews – hairdressers, nail salons, pediatricians, restaurants. It’s easy to set up a Facebook page for your business, and even easier to manage once you’ve created your page. So if someone other than you has set up a Facebook page for your business, then potential customers searching for your company may be unpleasantly surprised when they find a page that was created to defame your company.
Contact us about setting up your Google Page, Bing listing, Yelp listing or Facebook page.
If you already have a Facebook account and a Facebook page for your business, try out our FREE social media management tool. You’ll love the time saving features.