We’ve all heard about Twitter, but as business owners who haven’t adopted this tool for increasing traffic to their website here is some good news.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing websites in the world. As of November 2009 Twitter is now one of the top 50 sites on the internet.

One of the hottest use cases for Twitter, as you well know, is businesses communicating with their customers or potential customers. CNET News

So what’s my point? Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Without going into the specifics of how to accomplish this, I would like to introduce those Twitter users to a new service that helps them get more followers. This service is TweetLarge. TweetLarge is a Twitter service that will send you 1000 follower’s for free. With more followers, your company’s reputation increases thereby helping to gain your company additional notoriety.

And the best part, it will take less than 10 minutes to implement.

Go to TweetLarge.com and follow the 3 easy steps, and you too can have 1000 new followers for FREE.

And for those of you wondering why I haven’t been posting fresh ideas for your business marketing, my time over the past month has been helping a group of contractors network together to gain new business for the New Year. That is the bad news, the good news is my goal is to post 60 new articles over the next 60 days. So check back often to see how I’m doing and feel free to leave comments on the information I provide to help your business survive in these tough economic times.

In this case, the reviewer mistakenly gave a bad review to the customer because of a similarly spelled company. My customer, ABEL Garage Door, was mistaken for another contractor “ABLE Garage Door.” You might also be in a similar situation if you have a competitor in your market trying to piggy back your success. Or as in the majority of cases, we can’t please all of our customers all of the time. Especially when it comes to those “techie know it alls”, need I digress

All business owners have to take a proactive stance to make sure their reputation remains undamaged.

So the first question one has to ask is “How Do I Monitor How My Company Is Reviewed?” With the answer to this question, we can then discuss damage control.

The easy solution for monitoring your reviews on the internet is Google Alerts. With Google Alerts you can setup a notification that is sent directly to your email anytime anyone mentions your company.

Once notified of a problem, you can take steps at minimizing the damage. I found a great post in Google’s Help Center. While this advice is mainly targeting Google, it also works well with most user review type sites.

Hi Rick

I can understand your frustration. This is only my advice and it could work but no promises. First create some other accounts on review sites that Google pulls reviews from like
Yelp
Yellowbot
Tupalo
MojoPages
Judy’s Book
and ask your customers to give you some honest reviews about your business. Even if the false review still stays there it will push it down the list and people will see it is only once and not everybody.

Second have some other customers simply flag it as inappropriate with the reasons why and leave a good review on Google. Google would expect to have the business owner flag it as inappropriate and will give that little weight in the deletion on the listing but if you get a small group of people who can say this is false it will go a lot further.

It will take some time.

Let me know how it turns out.

Andy – LocalSEOInc

In particular, when it comes to a bad review on Yelp.com, as a business owner with a Yelp Business Owner’s Account, you have the ability to post a public response to a bad review. To capture your business owner’s account on Yelp go to biz.yelp.com

I hope you have found this information useful relating to damage control for handling a bad business review.

I never did explain Google Alerts. With that in mind, I will create a “Step by Step Guide to Setting Up Google Alerts” in another post.

Please feel free to leave your comments and questions below.

Thanks,

HomeBuildR