Tips on Using Customer Reviews in Social Media

Allowing customers to post reviews about your product or service is a great way to establish trust and credibility. According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Small business owners can capitalize on this trend by enabling reviews within their social media profiles and pages, which is something that we’re going to discuss in today’s blog post.

How Do I Enable Customer Reviews on Social Media?

Enabling customer reviews on social media varies depending on the particular network. For Facebook, you’ll need to create a Page under the “Local Business or Place” category. If your Page is located under a different category, customers won’t be able to post reviews. You can go back and change the category of your Facebook Page, however, by logging into your account and accessing the settings. Keep in mind that you won’t see any reviews — or even an option for reviews — until someone has posted a review about your business.

Respond Quickly to Negative Reviews

No matter how hard you try to prevent it, your business is bound to receive some negative reviews at some point. Even the most successful online retailers will have customers who aren’t fully satisfied. Rather than allowing negative reviews to define your business, you should work to resolve them with the customer — hopefully, turning them into positive reviews. If you notice a negative review posted on one of your brand’s social media pages, respond to the customer as soon as possible. Asking the customer for more information about the incident and offering to rectify it will often resolve negative reviews and comments.

Tag Reviews with Product Name and URL

When a customer posts a review about a product, tag his or her post with the product’s name and URL. Why is this important? Well, other social media users who see the review may want to check out the product, in which case including the URL will help guide him or her to the appropriate product.

Check All Social Media Networks for Reviews

Just because you don’t have an account on Yelp doesn’t necessarily mean that customer won’t use it to post a review. On the contrary, many social media networks will allow users to post reviews about businesses and brands — even if those businesses and brands aren’t actively present on the network. Allowing a negative review to sneak by undetected could have disastrous consequences for your business’s PR image. You can monitor new mentions of your brand name, however, by setting up Google Alerts to notify you whenever someone posts content about your business.

Have any other social media marketing tips that you would like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section below!