Whatever your business is, whether your brand is small or massive, online and Facebook reviews are crucial so they can affect your brand’s reputation. It is because these serve as the reference point for buyers worldwide, and many people trust them when making their purchasing decisions. Most people check out the reviews of a brand first before they start their transaction.
Positive reviews help businesses improve the brand’s reputation, enhance search engine ranking, boost profitability, and increase sales. Negative reviews, on the other hand, have several detrimental effects on businesses. This is why most brands do their best to delete bad Facebook reviews or eliminate other online reviews.
Ways Online and Facebook Reviews Can Affect Your Brand’s Reputation
More often than not, customers are more likely to write about bad experiences online (real or fake?). It is the simplest way to inform future customers of poor customer service. If your business is unaware of or ignores the power of reviews, you must look seriously at them.
Below are some of how Facebook and online reviews can affect your brand:
Undermine Business Reputation
Reviews, particularly the negative ones, can damage your brand’s reputation. They can make your potential customers trust your products or services less. Many people don’t purchase from stores with questionable credibility and a bad reputation. Most consumers question the company’s quality with negative reviews. Having many negative reviews can be challenging to fix, which is why most brands struggle to regain the trust of their consumers.
Loss of Revenue
Bad reviews on Yelp, Google, and Facebook significantly impact revenue. According to a report, businesses with 1 or 1.5-star ratings gain 33 percent less revenue. Most consumers also avoid companies with bad reviews.
Low Search Engine Ranking
Reviews may also affect your company’s search engine ranking. Negative reviews can make your brand rank poorly because search engines recommend brands with better reviews.
Drive Customers Away
If you want to gain more customers, you must be aware of the reviews of your business. Negative reviews may drive away your potential customers, or you might lose your current customers.
Why Pay Importance to Your Online Reviews?
As mentioned above, online reviews are one of the essential ways to drive more potential customers to your site. If you want to grow your business in no time, you must never take online reviews for granted because they can play an essential role in helping you succeed.
Additionally, online reviews can help search engines determine if your service or product has great value. This is why you have to put more effort into responding to reviews.
There are many reasons why online reviews are essential, and these include the following:
Boost Your Social and Credibility Proof
Almost everyone is more likely to make buying decisions after knowing what others say. Often, you ask for family and friends for recommendations. This is why reviews can have an impact on your credibility.
Generate More User-Generated Content
Since search engines love regular new content, reviews are a simple way to get new descriptive content about your service or product. Because it is user-generated, it is likely to be relevant to the search inquiries of your other customers.
Allow You to Understand Your Customers Better and Boost Your Customer Service
Analyzing the reviews left by your customers helps you keep your feet on the ground regarding overall customer satisfaction. They can give your business feedback about what your customers want. Using this information, you’ll be able to boost your customer service efficiently and quickly resolve consumer concerns. This creates a positive consumer experience, enabling you to focus more on their needs.
Create Customer Loyalty and Allow Consumers to Have a Voice
Customers who spend time leaving online reviews for your business are more likely to feel loyalty to you and will surely keep coming back. Leaving reviews and establishing relationships with your business enables consumers to feel like they have a voice and can give feedback meaningfully and positively.
Drive Brand Reputation With Facebook Reviews
Gaining credibility and trust online is much easier said than done. The online world is a competitive marketplace, and making your brand stand out among the rest can be challenging. However, with more people focusing on review sites and social recommendations, more brands are using their online reviews as their first defense to protect their reputation in the market.
Reviews Produce More Reviews
When businesses already receive reviews online, it will encourage other visitors to create their feedback. Just the appearance of some reviews seems enough to give new customers the confidence and incentive to submit feedback on a particular service or product.
Consumers Do Marketing for You With Facebook Reviews To Affect Your Brand
Positive online reviews for your brand are worth a good deal and may benefit your business that simple marketing campaigns cannot. They’re like micro-marketing campaigns, which keep working long after online reviews have been posted, providing a constant positive image to potential customers and creating continual brand awareness, which benefits the brand for both the long and short term.
Why Facebook Reviews Are Crucial to Your Brand’s Reputation?
As a business owner, you might not consider Facebook the focal point for online reviews. However, you should know that this platform is becoming prevalent among users looking for customer experiences. It makes sense because it has billions of account users spanning different demographics and ages.
If you do not build your presence on Facebook, you’re missing out on some things that can boost your revenues and exposure. There are many reasons why Facebook reviews can make a difference to your brand’s reputation with Facebook reviews to affect:
Most of Your Audience is a Facebook User
Almost everyone is connected to Facebook. As a business owner, it’s a perfect place to engage with your existing and potential customers. With the reviews of your active customers on Facebook, your brand will surely get the exposure or visibility you need to widen your reach locally or globally with Facebook business reviews.
Facebook Doesn’t Only Revolve Around Socializing
Facebook users aren’t just using the platform to socialize. For business owners, the platform serves as a place for their customers to share recommendations and reviews. Aside from Google and Yelp, Facebook is one of the top websites customers use to review businesses.
Allows You to Prioritize Your Customers More Facebook Reviews
Facebook reviews are less helpful if you’re not prioritizing your customer experience. So, make sure to treat your customers with respect. With this, your customers will more likely return the favor by recommending you to others with Facebook business reviews.
How to Manage Your Online and Facebook Reviews Properly?
While positive Facebook and online reviews can do good with your brand’s reputation, you can gain more if you know how to manage your customers’ reviews properly.
Often, most business owners take reviews for granted and think these won’t affect them. But, they don’t know that reviews have a huge impact not just on their reputation in the market but also on their sales.
If you have a website for your brand, most of your reviews will appear on your homepage. However, with the different review websites in the online world, you might not be able to control all of the reviews directly. If you have an account on Facebook, you can easily see it on your page. But, there are cases where some people post negative reviews on their pages.
Regardless of the case, it is essential to respond to every review. Responding can make a difference if your customers leave a positive or negative review.
Responding to reviews, particularly the negative ones, can help build consumer trust in your brand. Most unhappy customers will return to any business if issues are resolved efficiently and quickly.
Below are the other things you can do to manage your online and Facebook reviews:
Create a Response Strategy Facebook Reviews
Most customers expect your response within a few days of publishing reviews. Once you ignore reviews, it can impact your business. This is especially true with negative reviews because you might miss the chance to retain customers. Moreover, you might cause potential customers to not give you a chance because of your negative reviews.
The first thing you should do to handle such online reviews is to create your response strategy. Your strategy must focus on the internal response guidelines. It will give your team a framework of what they could and couldn’t say for any potential negative or positive review. In addition to that, it can help you stay consistent with your responses.
The next thing you must do is to put together your escalation plan. It must define when to escalate a problem, how to respond, and who to include. With a clear escalation plan, you can decrease the time your team needs to respond to particular concerns by taking the guesswork out of your situation.
The key to responding to reviews is to stay consistent. Never respond to negative reviews, and provide your positive reviewers some love. Also, do not forget to thank all the reviewers.
When it comes to reviews, try not to consider negative reviews wrong. Instead, consider them as opportunities. Take time to find a resolution and turn negative experiences into positive ones. By making the wrong things right and showing that you care, you will not only retain your current customers but also you will be able to gain more customers in the long run.
Keep It Professional
Do not argue with customers who leave negative reviews. Most of them can get very defensive once they do not get the perfect review and may come off as hostile in their response. If possible, determine a solution to the problem and provide remedies instead of explanations.
Showing empathy for the complaints of reviewers won’t just help defuse the situation. It can also create a chance to turn them to loyal customers who are willing to share positive customer service.
Remember that every business gets negative reviews. Whether they affect the buyers’ decisions is based on how you will respond. So, keep it professional and try to take it offline. Sometimes, it isn’t best to engage online, especially if the customer aims to ruin your business.
Track Reviews
Make it a habit to track your Facebook business reviews to affect your reputation. Set up reminders daily to check for new reviews on the platforms, including Yelp, social media outlets, and Google Reviews. Since reviews are considered one of the things that come up in Google searches, it is essential to dedicate somebody to manage and track them. Having ongoing insight into negative or positive reviews can help you resolve them.
You may also take advantage of the different review management software available in the market, which consolidates reviews in every location and platform in a single dashboard. Tracking reviews from your competitors may also make your brand better. With this, you will know what your customers say about you while gaining invaluable competitive insights.
Conclusion On Facebook Reviews And Your Brand
In today’s modern world, online and Facebook reviews can drive more customers to your business or to your countless competitors instead. Remember that reviews allow customers to convey their experience with your brand. And once customers leave negative reviews, it can damage your brand’s reputation. Therefore, businesses must monitor online reviews to ensure their brands are well-represented.
To maintain your positive reputation in the market, keep track of your online and Facebook reviews to affect your brand in a suitable format.
