Business Operation » Marketing & Advertising

The Challenges and Benefits of Removing Negative Online Content

Donna R. Thomas | Updated On March 28, 2024

Be it an individual or a business, negativity is bad for both. If seen from a business perspective, negative content or reviews can impact heavily on their reputation and goodwill. Due to this, the firm may face difficulties from both the consumer and the staff’s side. 

According to a study by Glassdoor, “It has been revealed that 50% of people wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation even if they are given a hike in the salary”.

If you want to prosper in this cutthroat competition and establish trust, building strong goodwill is a must for your firm. To turn things in your favor, you can try numerous services to  remove a review from Google. 

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The problem with negative content is much deeper than you think.

Refer to the article till the end to enlighten yourself.

Why Remove Negative Content from the Internet?

As a person, it is quite difficult to live in a society if you have a bad reputation. Likewise, for a business, it is quite arduous to compete and sustain in such an environment. A good reputation can enhance price premiums by 9.9% on average, whereas, 80% of customers hesitate to buy from companies with negative reviews.

Moreover, the impact of negative business content is not limited to sales only. It may also ruin your whole online presence. Be it YouTube, Instagram, or any other social media, your business might get targeted at any platform. 

Things do not stop here. The concept of customer loyalty is completely dependent on the feeling of trust between the enterprise and the end consumer. To make things even worse, your business’s customer loyalty may also be at stake due to negative content.

A primary example of such a situation can be Facebook. There have been numerous incidents in the past where news articles have reported widespread data leaks of their active users. 

As a result, the immediate consequence was a significant drop in Facebook’s stock price. In the weeks following the news in March 2018, the stock price fell by about 18%, representing a loss of billions of dollars in market capitalization.

This is how much your business can be affected by negative content. Anyway, you can’t remove or wash away your negative news on the internet, but you can remove negative comments and reviews from the web.

Benefits of Removing Negative Content and Building Better Business Reputation

Undoubtedly, negative content removal helps your business get a clean reputation. As a result, you can leverage numerous opportunities as listed below: 

Brand credibility refers to how much a consumer believes in the claims you make for your products and services. Brilliant business credibility can help your enterprise in several ways such as: 

• Better customer loyalty
• Higher conversion rates
• Strong presence in the competition
• On-field marketing through customer reviews

How to Track: Business credibility can be measured through Brand awareness, Brand preference, and Customer reviews.

If more customers have a good image of your company, it would be difficult for competition to replace you in their eyes. A strong online presence helps in: 

• Brand visibility
• Customer engagement
• Brand building
• Customer relationship management

How to Track: Major factors that can help you analyze your company’s online presence are website traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, and conversion rates.

You must have recommended your favorite brands to your friends as well. In industry terms, this phenomenon is known as Word-of-Mouth marketing. Imagine your business gaining such a reputation that your consumer recommends it to their friends and relatives. Luckily, this is very much possible if you adopt the correct strategy.

How to Track: Key metrics that can help you measure how your marketing is going among consumers are better referrals, increased revenue, better Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). 

One thing to note here is that removing negative reviews or content from the internet is not as easy as you might think. There are several challenges that you have to face and conquer. 

Challenges While Removing Negative Content

Negative content removal poses its challenges. However, if you are already aware of those challenges, planning & execution becomes easier:

What will you do if we tell you, “Do not think about an Elephant”? Your mind will subconsciously start imagining it, even if you do not want to. Likewise, removing negative content from the internet might draw even more attention to it. This effect is also known as Streisand effect. 

With the increasing trend of false information and negative trolls, it is getting harder to identify the real problem, even if you want to solve it. Moreover, negative trolls make the picture even blurry about the real cause and severely affect the brand image. 

The bigger the company, the bigger the consumer audience. If you run operations on a large scale, you might have thousands or millions of customers. Whereas, only tens or hundreds of employees deal with their reviews and concerns. The point here is that the content uploaded on the internet is overwhelming. Even if your employees work day and night, there would still be a lot of negative content left. 

Screenshots and recordings are a nightmare for companies that remove their negative content. If screenshots of your negative reviews get surfaced on the internet, it can damage your reputation even more than you think. 

So, these are the challenges that you have to face if you are removing negative online content. After analyzing, the best practice to follow would be making a proper balance between content removal and solving consumer queries. 

TL;DR

Removing negative content is quite significant for online businesses. It helps maintain your online presence and fosters customer loyalty. However, it can also backfire if people get to know that you focus more on removing negative content rather than solving queries.

Therefore, you must build a balance between content removal and solving customer problems.