A Smart Approach to Managing Your Business Reviews

Managing online reviews is a crucial part of your overall reputation management strategy. Prospective customers will see reviews and how you respond to them and judge your business and brand accordingly.

In other words, you need to take them seriously and put a process in place to monitor and respond to company reviews.

In this post, we’ll break down our approach to responding to reviews, why it’s important to acknowledge positive reviews, and platform-specific considerations to keep in mind as you construct your process.

Tips for Responding to Business Reviews

Responding to reviews is a chance to humanize your business for your customers and prospects. Here are some ways to do that effectively:

Embrace transparency

While the majority of your reviews should be positive, having a mix of positive and negative reviews will show authenticity. Having all 5-star reviews is suspect and looks fake. Reviews lower than 5 stars are also an opportunity to showcase how you interact with customers and handle criticism.

Respond in a timely fashion

Set up notifications to see reviews as soon as they come in. Responding quickly shows people you care about your business, customers, and employees. It also helps to resolve issues and address fake reviews faster.

Personalize it

Avoid using canned responses; they are easy to spot and look disingenuous. Customers who take the time to write you a real review will appreciate and feel heard if you write a real response tailored to them.

Keep it short and sweet

Avoid rambling or long responses. If it’s in response to a negative review, it can come off as defensive at a glance. Get your message across succinctly.

Double check before responding

Tone can get lost in text, which has a tendency to make things worse. When in doubt, have a second set of eyes review the response before posting to avoid coming off in an unintended way.

Use social proof

Link to your relevant rating profiles on 3rd-party platforms from your website. This builds credibility and allows prospective customers to do research outside of testimonials or reviews posted on your own website.

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Implement feedback

Create a plan to keep track of feedback and pass it on to the right people. If your average rating is lower than you’d like, work on improving it. Listen to the feedback you’re getting and figure out how it can be improved.

Tips for Responding to Positive Reviews 

Do yourself a favor and thank the people who took the time to leave positive reviews. The ideal scenario would be to respond to all reviews, even if it’s just with a quick thank-you. If the volume of reviews is too high to respond to all of them, ensure you respond to all of them that need to be addressed, and respond to additional ones as you can.

When you do respond, keep these tips in mind:

Show gratitude

Remember, human nature means people are far more likely to share negative experiences than positive ones. People who take time to leave good reviews are relatively rare, and they’re extremely helpful to your business. Thank them for taking the time.

Reiterate the positives

If the customer mentioned something specific they loved about your service or product, highlight that aspect in your response. This reinforces the positive message and makes the positive review more memorable for readers.

Invite them back

Let people know you’re looking forward to serving them or working with them again.

Promote your business

Depending on what they call out, the review could provide an opportunity to subtly mention a related product, service, or feature they might enjoy.

Repurpose for marketing

Screenshot positive reviews and save them as social proof. They can be used on your website, social media, emails, or other promotional materials.

Platform-Specific Considerations

While the above information applies to all platforms, there are a few nuances to keep in mind on some specific platforms.

Google

Google reviews are managed through Google Business Profile. They will show up in search results, Google Maps, and your company’s Google Business Profile. Offering incentives for reviews is against Google’s policy.

If you have enough ratings – usually at least 100 – you can include the seller rating in Google Ads. These ratings can be collected through Google reviews or other independent review websites that Google supports.

Facebook 

If you find yourself with fake reviews, too many bad reviews, or if it’s not a channel you care to gather reviews on, Facebook gives you the option to remove the Reviews tab from your profile page so no reviews will be visible. For more details on how to do this, check out 3 things to do if you receive a negative review on Facebook.

LinkedIn

There aren’t any formal options to leave reviews for companies on LinkedIn. However, if you offer services from your personal page, your clients can leave you reviews that show up on your services page. There is also an option to turn this feature off to make reviews private only to you if you do not want to show them on your page.

Glassdoor

Glassdoor isn’t focused on your customers, but it’s still an important channel to stay on top of for your current and prospective employees. Claim or set up your company profile, update all the info, and make sure you get notifications when new reviews are added. Follow the same recommendations in responding and know that many candidates will be looking at what employees have to say, and how you respond.

B2B review platforms

For B2B and SaaS companies, review platforms like Capterra, G2, or Clutch may be the most impactful for your business. These are platforms where you’ll want to fill out all your info and proactively try to get reviews. They are used as directories and search engines for customers who are actively looking for specific services. The more reviews you have, the higher up you’ll be listed, the better you’ll look, and the easier it will be for customers to do research. 

These platforms often have built in services to help make it easy to collect reviews from your customers. There is also the opportunity to set up advertising campaigns on the platforms which will perform better with the more reviews you have.

Yelp

Yelp might be one of the main platforms you focus on if you’re a local business, in which case it’s important to know how Yelp’s review visibility works. Yelp recommends reviews it believes will be most helpful based on quality, reliability, and user activity. Not all reviews may be shown in the recommended section, especially if they're from users with little activity on Yelp or appear biased or fake.

Check all the policies carefully as well. They do not allow incentivizing reviews, asking for reviews, or reviews left by business-owners or employees.

Start responding to reviews

It’s never too late to start or improve your strategy when it comes to business reviews. Having a process in place to handle company reviews will help safeguard your brand and boost your online reputation. While the results of these efforts may be hard to track or attribute, they can have big positive impacts on marketing and sales. Now that you have the basics down, read our tips on how to address negative and fake business reviews.

If you’d like to chat about how your approach to reviews fits into your marketing strategy, drop us a line.