If you’ve ever bought anything online, you’ve encountered a typical online review. You might have found typical rating in form of stars for a product you wanted to buy, or a very long review about one user’s traumatic experience with it. Though customer reviews range in thoroughness and comprehensibility, they do hold a powerful effect on the behavior of your audience and give you the important online reputation you need to be successful. But it is not so easy to manage your online reputation, including reviews and social media feedback.
Let’s have a look what really matters and how you can successfully manage your online reputation and gain the trust of your customers.
Trust and reviews
The reason you trust a local store or business is manifold. Maybe you know the local store owner over many years, share some history together and probably won’t be surprised in the future. Even if a problem occurs, you know where to find him to solve it.
You trust someone if your experiences in the past were positive and you can expect that they will be positive in the future as well. If you do not share any experience you often rely on experiences or recommendations of other persons.
Trust emerges based people’s experiences in form of recommendations or reviews.
The claim that reviews are one of the most important things online is not an exaggeration. 90% of people first check out a business online before they buy or consider a transaction. Hence reviews are a major driver of the e-commerce and most internet transactions need them as a trust basis in order to take place. Furthermore, online reviews lead to increased sales and are crucial for shops, hotels and almost every other service provider. In fact, up to 30% of people are likely to spend more on a business that has positive reviews.
Show your reputation on your website with Trustami
Consumers seek for any sign that the shop is trustworthy when buying stuff online. Therefore, it is essential that a shop provides some sort of external rating. Simply seeing a bunch of positive reviews is a game changer for e-commerce.
Try the unique trust badges from Trustami in order to bundle all your reviews and social media feedback: Register for free
Fake reviews and reputation
Because customer experiences are so important, it is no surprise that reviews are used to gain popularity. It is possible to buy positive reviews for your shop or product. In fact, there is a huge market for this type of business. And in some cases, it is not very easy to separate fake ratings from regular ones. Because of the huge impact of written customer experiences, it is not unusual that companies buying fake reviews to increase their sales.
Fake restaurant “Shed at Dulwich” No. 1 on TripAdvisor’s ranking
Lifestyle and food writer Oobah Butler described on Vice.com that he was wondering why restaurant owners would pay him money for writing a positive review of their place, despite never eating there.
He decided to create a fake restaurant, to see if he could reach TripAdvisor’s No. 1 ranking with a restaurant that doesn’t even exist.
He renamed the backyard shed where he lives in South London the “Shed at Dulwich”. He created a website and logo, listed the restaurant as „by appointment only“ (thus avoiding giving the address), named dishes ever so trendily for moods and concocted pictures of fake food.
At the end the fake restaurant got many positive reviews from friends and was listed after around six months no. 1 on TripAdvisor.
Is social feedback better than reviews?
The use of social media has now been anchored for a long time in the everyday life of many people. The number users on networks like Facebook or Instagram is growing constantly, and that’s why these channels are used by companies regularly. Thus, the influence of social media has continued to increase in recent years. Almost every third user buys a product or service online based on a recommendation in social media. Even 25% have made such purchase decisions because of social media advertising.
Every online company that ignores social media will face disadvantages compared to those who use this marketing channel effectively. So far, social media is not yet as relevant as customer reviews or product reviews, but it’s gaining relevance fast.
Fans can easily express their enthusiasm for a business, product or service through likes, shares or comments. Regular interest becomes visible through subscribers or views. Social media feedback is becoming almost as important as positive reviews. Some even say that in the future known review systems can be replaced by social media feedback.
As explained before, it is increasingly important to have a good reputation online. This is not only characterized by the fact that there is a high number of positive reviews, but also should be supplemented by the popularity in social networks.
7 Tips for managing your reputation
Reputation is really important for every online business to be successful. That’s why you should protect and manage your reputation wisely. How can you do that?
- Google your business: You can review businesses on so many websites and platforms: on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google, Facebook and many others. First, start searching for your business and already existing reviews. You’ll be surprised, sometimes you find reviews you did not know about.
- Understand your customers: Read your reviews and figure out what people find really good and maybe not so good about your business. Make a list with the top customer reviews relevant for you and update this list regularly. This gives you the chance to stay in touch with your customers with no need of sending surveys or annoying emails.
- Communicate positive reviews: Use your positive customer experiences to emphasize your key benefits or to show user stories.
- Respond to negative feedback: respond as fast as possible to negative comments in two ways. Publish a response directly where the negative review is written. This may only be possible if you are managing an account on the platform. Second, if possible directly respond to your customer and explain your reasons or present him your view on this issue. Be open for criticism and optimization.
- Be present on several review platforms: As the example of the fake restaurant on tripadvisor shows, it may be easy to fake reviews on one platform but it is a lot of work to do so on many platforms. That is why you should collect or distribute your reputation across different channels. Another benefit is, that you are more independent from a specific provider. That makes it easier to switch providers.
- Pool all reputation at one place: Present your total reputation from every source at one place., so the customer does not have to search for every bit of reputation by himself. Especially in E-Commerce it is the first impression you make which decides if the customer is buying or not. You can do this for free with Trustami
- Protect your reputation: It takes a long time to get many reviews and good online reputation. That’s why you should consider protecting or saving your hard-earned reviews against loss. With Trustami you are able to import every review from each platform and save it with Trustami. In case of account deletion on one platform you are still able to use your saved reviews with Trustami. Have a look at our review insurance.
Build trust on many different channels and platforms
In order to build trust in your business and emphasize your trustworthiness it is recommended to gather reviews, likes or followers on more than one platform. But why? First, people like to rate your business at different places. Some prefer your Facebook business page, but some others would choose a dedicated review provider. Try to make it as easy as possible for them to give you a positive review.
Second, it gets more difficult and time consuming to fake several profiles on many different networks. Although reviews are so important, this is not worth it and often not possible – especially for smaller businesses. Your customers know this as well. That’s why they trust you even more if your online reputation is spread across many places. But it’s also not very convenient for potential customers to look up your reputation on many different sites.
Keep an eye on your reputation
It is not so easy to notice every review and react to it. If your business grows the amount of reviews normally and the places where you get reviews growth with it. When you are smaller you get reviews on your directly managed channels. But when you gain more customers some of them, especially the unsatisfied customers, write down their experience on other channels to show their feelings. Many professional businesses hiring people only for checking their own online reputation and responding to reviews.
In order to make it easy for you to stay informed about your reviews. You can user Trustami and register for free your account. You can pool all your review and social media networks in one public profile and use a dashboard. This makes it a lot easier for you to keep an eye on your whole reputation and the changes. If you want to save even more time, you can try our review alert, which informs you on a daily basis if you get a negative review somewhere.
Furthermore, it is recommended to respond to negative reviews in a short time. Negative reviews unanswered can hurt your business. Also, is it sometime necessary to delete unfair reviews. For instance, people often write a negative review about a seller because the delivery was too late. They often cannot separate for example on Amazon, that the product is sold by a seller and delivered by Amazon logistics, where the seller cannot do anything about the delivery. When you sell via marketplaces, contact the provider after an unfair review and ask them to delete the review. In many cases that will work, as long as you can explain why the review is not fair.
What next?
Do you already have reviews, likes or followers on several platforms like Yelp, Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, Trustpilot, Etsy and many more? Then step out, collect and show your distributed reviews and social media feedback in one place. You will help your customers to trust your business much faster than before and thereby increase your sales and conversion rates. With Trustami you can pool all trust signals with just a few clicks and in less than five minutes.
