TripAdvisor reviews are the only type of online review that matters for hotels, whether it’s a large, branded, commercial resort or a small, in-home bed and breakfast. If you’re an experienced hotelier, you are well aware of this fact. TripAdvisor has cornered the market on travel reviews, and love it or hate it, it’s not going away anytime soon.

A high-quality lodging experience with attentive customer service helps, but only if those guests leave a positive review on TripAdvisor. Wrapping up their experience into a neat, tidy, positive review could ultimately determine whether all your work was worth it.

TripAdvisor reviews are invaluable for two reasons.

SEO Value

If you run an established hotel with a powerful brand name, you likely have a website that’s professionally built and maintained with constant attention given to SEO best practices. TripAdvisor will not beat your brand’s hotel domain in search results. For all other hotels, however, especially ones without a corporate brand, your TripAdvisor profile will outrank your hotel’s website on Google search results.

Go ahead, give it a try. Search for your hotel by name in Google and see what shows up first.

This is why you need positive TripAdvisor reviews; it’s what your customers see first when they search for your hotel online.

They’re Trusted

The platform averages 390 million unique monthly users and 96 percent of TripAdvisor users consider reviews before booking a hotel. Over half of users will not book a room at a hotel with zero reviews. TripAdvisor is the go-to resource for travelers around the globe and it is highly trusted. Don’t you want your guests to trust you too?

When your guests read positive reviews on TripAdvisor, they are willing to trust your brand, your staff and your hotel with something that many people consider as invaluable: their vacation.

Whether they’re only getting away for a weekend or they’re planning their annual trip (the only vacation they’ll have all year!), they’re putting an incredible amount of trust in whichever hotel they end up choosing, and you want that hotel to be yours. With the TripAdvisor brand and thousands of reports from other happy guests, you can earn that trust before the next guest even finalizes their reservation.

What if You Had a Say?

Maybe you’ve already embraced TripAdvisor and have started incorporating reviews onto your website. Maybe you’re resistant because you worry about the impact of negative reviews.

But what if you had some control over what’s posted?

Using Accrue Reviews, you can send customers a link for feedback. They share their thoughts, and all positive reviews are posted on TripAdvisor. If they have serious negative complaints, the feedback is redirected to you, so you have a chance to work out the issue privately with the unhappy customer.

Want to learn more? Contact us today to get the details on how it works and how it could benefit your hotel.

How can small businesses get great online reviews?

You can beat out your competitors and enhance your business’ digital reputation, but you need a system. Blindly asking (or simply hoping) for reviews rarely gets good results.

When You Don’t Have a Plan

What does your review request process look like? Does it involve one or all four of the steps below?

1. Wait and Hope for the Best

You do very best for your customers, all with their complete satisfaction in mind. You go the extra mile and deliver outstanding service. But then … you step back. You don’t ask for a review, you just wait and hope for the best.

2. Hope Your Clients Realize How Much Value You’ve Provided

If you do wind up asking for an online review, you may mention it casually and simply hope they’ll realize how much better their life is since they did business with you. You hope they’ll draw the conclusion you want, which is that you are the best choice in your industry, offering value that’s miles above the competition.

3. Hope They Come Back When They Need More Help

You serve your client once, then you hope that they’ll think of you again when they need your service or product. But sometimes it takes more than one experience with a business for a customer to be motivated to write an online review.

4. Hope They Take the Time to Write Something Meaningful

You can’t tell your customers what to say, so you just cross your fingers and hope they say something good and mention specific selling points that will convince future customers to give your business a try.

When You Take the Smart Approach

Small businesses can get great online reviews when they have a game plan and they use a service like Accrue Reviews to build a solid digital reputation. How?

1. You Time Your “Ask” Perfectly

With your new review accumulation game plan, you schedule customer follow-ups at the right time, right after they’ve interacted with you, and your service or product is fresh in their minds. If they’re satisfied with what you’ve offered, they’re more than willing to write a quick online review when they’re asked. If they aren’t, you have the chance to salvage the customer relationship and then ask for a positive review.

Instead of randomly selecting old clients who may not remember how you helped them, take advantage of your happy customers while they’re still thinking of you.

2. You Clearly Outline How You’ve Saved Them Time and Money

When you ask for an online review, you do so armed with plenty of facts. If your service saved them money, you know exactly how much. If your team saved them time, you have a rough estimate of the number of hours you added back into their life.

By reminding them of these exceptional benefits, you’re giving them fodder they can use when writing their online review.

3. You Regularly Remind Them That You’re There for Them

Let’s say your customer had a great experience the first time, but perhaps needs even more exceptional service to become a true believer in your company and to leave a sparkling online review. Strategically capitalize on your initial relationship, regularly reminding that past customer how you’re there for them and you’re ready to provide future service whenever they need it.

4. You Explain How a Specific Testimonial Would Benefit Your Company

For the customers who love your business and want to help, specifically outline how online reviews will help you boost your reputation. You aren’t shy about talking about the power of online reviews and how a report of their good experience will not only help your business, but help others find what they’re looking for too!

Can You Tell the Difference?

Scenario one depends on a whole lot of hope, but a lot more strategic action takes place in scenario two.

At Accrue Reviews, we’ve established a system that eliminates questioning, wondering and hoping, and replaces them with confidence, action and results.

Small business can get great online reviews when they depend on us. Your company’s online reviews can make or break your success – shouldn’t you take them seriously? Call us today or sign-up online and start taking charge of your digital reputation with our easy-to-use, customer and business owner-friendly system.

To build trust digitally, doctors need online reviews. Without a thriving online professional reputation, doctors may see their offline success falter, especially as digital opinions become more and more influential in guiding consumer behavior.

Doctors may be wary of the value of online reviews and fearful of what a bad review could do to their practice. Seventy-eight percent of doctors say worrying about receiving negative online feedback makes their job more stressful.

But what if you could actively work to encourage positive feedback? What if you had more control over what patients posted about you? This could relieve much of the anxiety you feel about online opinions of you and your practice.

Why exactly do doctors need online reviews?

It Helps Patients Find You

Online reviews help doctors show up on the first page of Google. Healthgrades.com, the most popular site for doctor reviews, hosts at least 1 million visitors per day. If a patient searches for a type of doctor in a specific town, Healthgrades.com shows the top doctors in the area.

Also, Google uses the quantity and quality of published online feedback as a search engine ranking factor, making it more likely for potential patients to find you.

Reviews Create Their First Impression

Your Healthgrades.com profile is likely in the top three results when a patient conducts an online search for your name. Your Google reviews will pop up as well. According to a survey, 77 percent of patients use digital feedback as their first step in finding a doctor. The content of your online reviews forms your patients’ first impression of you personally, and your practice.

Don’t Depend on Your Network

Doctors need online reviews because they help bring in new patients. Forty-seven percent of survey respondents say they would spend money and go out of their health care network to see a doctor that has qualifications similar to their in-network physician, but better patient reviews.

It’s Important for Doctors to Respond

Doctors need online reviews to grow their businesses, but they also need to respond to those reviews. Sixty percent of patients surveyed say it’s either “very important” or “moderately important” for doctors to address the feedback left online regarding their care.

Quality patient care starts with listening, and that includes listening to digital feedback as well as concerns shared behind office doors.

Patients Will Leave Reviews Whether You Pay Attention or Not

Fifty-three percent of doctors read online feedback about themselves, so over half of practitioners understand that patients are posting about them online.

Eighty-four percent of patients use online reviews to evaluate physicians. It’s time to get control over what they’re reading about you.

Doctors need online reviews that show their strengths, and that’s where Accrue Reviews comes in. We provide a platform for you to proactively ask for feedback from your patients and respond privately to negative comments. By answering patient concerns in a private forum, you may be able to alter their opinion with changes to their care, turning an otherwise damaging review into a positive addition to your digital profile. Ready to get started?

Hotel reviews aren’t just a vanity metric — they’re an important indicator of profit and long-term success.

In the hospitality industry, the customer experience is paramount to all else. If you don’t have positive hotel reviews to back up your marketing claims, expect occupancy rates to drop and average daily rate to follow. Online hotel reviews aren’t merely important; they’re paramount when it comes to maintaining your hotel’s digital reputation.

Reputation: It’s All Your Hotel Has

As all hoteliers know, reputation management is a skill that can’t be learned on the fly. You have to masterfully craft your reputation from day one, with no lapses in monitoring. It’s a constant responsibility that ultimately determines your future, and online opinions of your guests are at the core of what’s transmitted digitally to future potential customers.

Reputation management can be broken down into three stages:

1. The foundation stage: building a positive view of the hotel when it first opens
2. The growing stage: maintaining an excellent, superior image in the court of public opinion
3. The responding stage: reversing and recovering when customers have a bad experience or there is a marketing error

If you handle stages one and two correctly and combine them with excellence in all other aspects of hotel management, stage three isn’t a place you’ll have to visit.

It Starts with Web Traffic

Online hotel reputation management comes down to the number of reviews the hotel has and the quality of those reviews. Ultimately, the main benefit of having hotel reviews in the first place is because more reviews mean more web traffic.

Fifty-three percent of consumers will not book a hotel that has no online reviews. When hotels display reviews on their website and integrate review content with their own, their website is crawled up to 200 percent more frequently. The more traffic directed toward your site, the higher the likelihood that some of those online visitors will become guests.

Reviews Guide Online Behavior

Second, when the online guest opinions are positive, they direct booking behaviors positively as well. Here are some statistics to back it up:

• 97.7 percent of consumers read other travelers’ online reviews
• 77.9 percent of consumers consider other travelers’ reviews either extremely or very important when choosing a hotel

Your Behavior Guides Online Behavior

Beyond simply having positive reviews, there’s another factor at play: how your hotel responds to online reviews. Travelers don’t just want to hear from other travelers. They want to hear from you too.

Seventy-nine percent of travelers say if hotel management responds well to a bad review, they feel reassured. Seventy-eight percent say if hotel management offers thanks for a good review, they think highly of the hotel.

Constant maintenance of your hotel’s online reviews is essential. It’s part of how you craft a customer-centric image of your hotel’s priorities.

Positive Reviews = Success

Researchers at Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research studied the impact of online reviews on hotel pricing, occupancy rates and overall revenue and found that a hotel’s online reputation is powerful.

A 1 percent increase in a hotel’s online reputation score translated to a 0.89 percent increase in price, a 0.54 percent increase in the occupancy rate and a 1.42 percent increase in revenue per available room.

The data backs it up — positive online feedback means more guests and more money.

We’re Here to Help

Accrue Reviews assists hoteliers with online reputation management by providing a user-friendly system for requesting, reviewing and posting hotel reviews. Contact us today if you’re ready to take control of your hotel’s online reputation — we’re here to help.

The connection between social media and online reviews is undeniable. The digital world we live in means the modern-day consumer can find out what a stranger thinks about a business, as well as what their friends think, all with just a few taps on their smartphone.

You don’t have the option of hiding your business from social media and online reviews. The conversations and the comments will happen online regardless — it’s up to you to decide if you want to join in.

Consumers Turn to Online Reviews

Online reviews aren’t just a side note consumers consider when they’re having a difficult time making a decision — they’re a go-to. In fact, 84 percent of people trust online reviews just as much as a peer recommendation, even though they’ve never met the reviewer.

Online reviews are important, but you don’t have much time to make an impression; 90 percent of consumers read fewer than 10 before making up their mind about a business. But 54 percent of people who read positive reviews will visit your website afterward, so online reviews can deliver a high traffic conversion rate in an extremely short period of time.

Consumers Spend Massive Amounts of Time on Social Media

Hmmm … where else do people go online to share shopping horror stories or, on the other hand, share a great experience with a brand or business? You guessed it: Facebook.

Facebook is on track to hit 2 billion monthly active users in 2017. Two billion! That’s a lot of people. And 66 percent of those people log in to Facebook every day.

Thanks to Facebook’s “reviews” tab for business pages, customers are no longer relegated to Google and Yelp as their main review sites — now they can leave feedback on the social media platform that a large portion of the world uses every day.

Reviews posted on social platforms carry a lot of authority. Not only can the user see if any of their friends have rated or reviewed a business, they can usually tell relatively quickly whether the review left on the page was posted by a real person or seems to be from a fake account.

Instead of logging into Yelp, why not just search for the local business on Facebook? From the popularity of Facebook ads to the growing use of social media by businesses, Facebook is quickly becoming the spot to check on a business before buying.

Social Media Is an Opportunity for Authenticity

So you know online reviews are highly trusted. You know consumers are spending significant amounts of time on Facebook. How are online reviews and social media connected and how can it help you increase conversions?

It’s simple – you have to jump into the conversation.

Taking a hands-off approach won’t work. The modern consumer doesn’t trust traditional marketing messages. They don’t want to be manipulated. They don’t want you to sell to them.

They want a relationship, and social media gives you the opportunity to build a genuine, engaging digital presence that connects with individual customers and shows the world what you value.

An active social presence allows you to respond to complaints with kindness, exemplify professionalism and demonstrate your dedication to excellence. It helps build authenticity, which can help restore your digital image if it does take a hit, and helps consumers learn who to trust — you or the negative reviewers determined to take you down.

Cultivate Positive Reviews to Grow Your Social Presence Even More

Of course, just having a great social media strategy doesn’t equal positive reviews. Five-star feedback starts offline with the customer experience. But with a service like Accrue Reviews, your reputation can grow positively online. Taking the time to cultivate top reviews provides fodder for a continued authentic social media presence: You can share testimonials and customer feedback to further engender trust with your audience.

Time to Get Started

Online reviews and social media shouldn’t (and can’t) be ignored. Let Accrue Reviews help you build the digital reputation your business deserves and show future customers what sets you apart!

Everyone wants 5-star reviews. From contractors to e-commerce stores to dog walkers, you want your satisfied, happy clients telling the world how amazing you are! That can only be good for your business right?

Well, not quite. Recent research reveals that 5-star reviews have less of an impact on purchase decisions than star ratings that fall between 4.2 and 4.5. Yes, you really can be too awesome.

The “Too Good to Be True” Complex

Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center partnered with PowerReviews and found that sales of products with a 4.2-to-4.5-star ratings were the most influenced by ratings. When products had a 5-star rating, the purchaser was less likely to consider the reviews in their purchasing decision.

What’s wrong with 5-star reviews? Shouldn’t you aim for 5-star reviews all the time? Why can’t modern consumers make up their minds!

It all comes down to the common belief: “It’s too good to be true.”

Most consumers expect a certain level of detraction from the norm. When all they see are 5-star reviews, suspicions arise. There is no way you’re a 5-star contractor — those don’t exist! You can’t possibly have made every single customer happy — that’s ridiculous!

The Modern Consumer Craves Authenticity

The modern consumer is looking for authenticity. When all they see are 5-star reviews, they start to wonder … have you deleted the less-than-favorable ones? Have you unfairly paid people to leave only positive feedback?

A mix of good and bad reviews is healthy. It shows you’re genuine, and that’s what the modern customer wants.

It’s About Review Content Too

While the star rating of your product or service is vital, it’s not everything. The content of the review matters as well.

For example, if you have multiple 4-star reviews with long explanations on why the client has chosen this rating result, it’s going to take fewer of them to convince your target audience you’re authentic. The “meat” of the review matters.

Sometimes the customer’s detailed opinion helps you, even if it’s in the form of a negative review. They may say: This product didn’t come in the dusky orange shade the picture shows, it was actually an orange-pink! But every customer who’s looking for that shade will use that information to take the next purchasing step.

Negative Reviews Give an Opportunity to Grow

Besides showing authenticity to your customers, you should welcome (somewhat) the presence of a few less-than-perfect reviews because it will give you a deeper insight on what your business can do to better serve your target market.

Make sure you always respond to clients who leave negative reviews, as this is a perfect opportunity to show off your effortless peacemaking skills. Then, take what the negative reviewers say to heart and contemplate making changes if it’s in the best interests of the future of your business.

Is Google Messing Up Your Average?

Many small-business owners vying for shining online reviews get worried when Google starts showing less than 5-star ratings, even though all of your feedback has reached the highest level.

Be aware that Google uses a calculation method called the Bayesian average. When the data set is too small, meaning you have too few reviews on your Google profile, Google refers to its larger data set of reviews and estimates what your business’ average would be if you had more reviews.

This can be cause for concern for some business owners, because if they feature three 5-star reviews but consumers see a 4.8 average, the consumer might question whether the business is filtering out the less-than-good feedback. What can you do?

Get more reviews. The more you build up your numbers, the higher the likelihood Google will calculate an accurate average for you.

Are You Stuck?

It’s hard to come up with an efficient, working system to generate enough online reviews to spur business growth, but that’s why Accrue Reviews exists. We are here to help you aim for your goal of endless 5-star reviews — real ones, that the consumer can’t help but trust. Call us today to learn more about what we can do for you!

You want your customers to leave online reviews, because 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. But how can you get your customers, especially the happy, satisfied ones, to leave honest, easy-to-read feedback online?

You can take specific steps to help your customers leave online reviews. You can’t do it for them, but you have to be proactive to get results. Positive reviews can have a major effect on the success of your local business, so start boosting your digital reputation with some proven strategies.

Claim Your Business on All Platforms

First, make sure your business is visible on all the platforms the modern consumer looks at before deciding on a purchase. Everyone should claim their Google listing, and every business needs an official Facebook page. Restaurants should be on Yelp. Contractors should be on Angie’s List.

Fill out your online profile with updated information on your products, services, hours and website. Make sure your past and future customers can find you on these platforms and you’re one step closer to getting the digital reviews you need.

Make it as Easy as Possible

If your customers have to go out of their way to look up your business and write a review, they probably won’t. It’s not that they aren’t happy with your service, it’s just they don’t want to take the time.

It’s important to make the digital review process as easy as possible. Sending your customers a mobile or email link is the best way to elicit feedback — just a few taps on their smartphone and your online review is on its way.

Ask … But Don’t Wait Too Long

Sometimes the most obvious solution is the most effective. In this case, simply asking your customers could be the best way to get them to leave online reviews. However, there’s still a right and a wrong way to go about asking, so pay attention to timing.

If you try to cram your profiles full of online reviews in the space of a few days by asking all your customers from the past six months for feedback, it won’t go well. The customers you haven’t communicated with in months likely forgot all the details of their experience at your business. And it looks suspicious when a business goes from no online reviews to 20 within the space of a week.

Get into the habit of asking your customers right after your transaction is done whether they’re happy with what you’ve provided. Ask them if they mind taking a couple of minutes to share their experience online. This will create a regular stream of feedback, and it’s a good habit for a healthy digital reputation.

Offer an Incentive

It’s not ethical (or legal on many platforms) to pay customers to leave online reviews. However, to build up your digital reviews, you could run a contest with a giveaway, and when customers leave online reviews, it counts as their entry.

As long as you aren’t encouraging customers to leave positive reviews only, this is acceptable in many cases. Explicitly state that you are looking for honest feedback in order to improve your products and service offerings.

Involve All Employees in Your Effort

Get your employees in on the game! You can reward employees who get the most online feedback. Offer a cash prize to the employee who is able to generate the most online reviews for their positive, helpful service.

Respond to Online Reviews

Business owners should take a personal interest in responding to all online reviews of their business. For positive reviews, a simple, “Thank you for your feedback!” is all that’s needed. For negative reviews, it’s important to try to correct the complaint and offer a solution.

If possible (and it is possible when you’re using Accrue Reviews), try to take the conversation offline and address the unhappy customer’s negativity in private. Many times, this gives you an opportunity to turn their initial bad review into a good one.

Share a Positive Review on Your Social Channels

Encourage past happy customers who follow you on social media to leave online reviews when you share a review that stands out. Pick a review that highlights what your company does best, and thank the customer by name for offering their opinion. Many times, this can lead to an influx of reviews from satisfied customers who feel the same way and want to help your business succeed.

Depend on Accrue Reviews

Our service is designed with the modern consumer in mind. They receive a text or email with a link to write feedback on your business on their social or digital platform of choice. This is a convenient, effective way to generate online reviews because it’s streamlined, it’s personal and it’s at their fingertips.

Ready to try it out? Contact us today set up your free trial and explore our monthly subscription packages. Get customers to leave online reviews with a user-friendly service that fits your budget.

Why should you have reviews on Google when there are so many other review sites? What makes Google so special?

Your small business has a set budget for local marketing, and you know online reviews are a large part of what connects businesses to the right customers. Which review site is going to help you achieve this goal?

The Google Giant

Just a little background — Google is taking over local marketing. Even though they’re new to the review game, with Google+ Local reviews launching in 2012 followed by Google My Business in 2014, they have become the search engine giant people turn to for local results.

They’re a reliable source of information for everything the consumer needs to know: hours, address, phone number, driving directions and of course, reviews. It just makes sense to Google a business — Google, after all, is the new verb to describe searching online.

But besides Google’s intuitive popularity among your target customers, getting more reviews on Google should be your focus when you’re building up your online reputation with customer reviews.

Google Reviews Directly Affect Local Organic Search Results

According to Moz, review signals — including review quantity, velocity and diversity — account for between 7 and 13 percent of local organic search results. It would naturally follow that since Google’s reviews are directly linked to their search engine, they’re going to factor into whether you get to the top spot when searchers Google “plumber in Salt Lake City.”

Local SEO starts on Google. Claiming your My Business page on Google is the first step, but ensuring you have a healthy reputation from your online reviews is an integral part of the process as well. It shows Google customers are visiting your business and care enough to post about their experience, and that’s enough to make Google recognize you too.

Google Lets You Ask for Reviews

Yelp has a strict policy against businesses asking consumers to review their products or services. Yelp believes businesses will only ask customers who they know have a favorable view of them to leave feedback, unfairly skewing the results in their favor, and potentially damaging Yelp’s reputation as a fair, balanced, authentic review site.

Google isn’t quite as strict. You are allowed to reach out to customers right after you’ve done business with them and ask them to leave a review on Google. It’s frowned upon (and may get you flagged for spamming) to have customers leave reviews in waves, but genuinely requesting reviews on a regular basis is acceptable, and a great way for your small business to build a digital reputation.

Getting reviews on Google is also convenient because the platform makes it easy for you to respond. You are allowed to defend your brand and try to resolve complaints, or thank your satisfied patrons for their feedback.

Google Shares Reviews from Additional Sites

Google shows consumers results from many different sites, like Yelp, OpenTable, Facebook and more. For this reason, consumers might not even bother opening one of the other review sites — they might just search on Google. Many believe Google’s commitment to transparency beats out the competition and will slowly become the preferred platform for review aggregation.

Want to amass detailed reviews from your best customers? Trust Accrue Reviews to help you get started, providing an easy-to-use system that helps you build your digital reputation. Contact us today to learn more!

Don’t let online trolls get the best of your small business. Accusations, negativity and combativeness can easily bring down your digital reputation, even if all the claims are baseless.

Instead of sitting back and letting online trolls have their way, or worse, responding and escalating the conflict, first understand why trolls exist in the first place, then learn seven effective strategies to handle each case.

Why Do Haters Exist?

Everyone, even the most successful brands, have haters. Some people will love everything about your company, from your values to your products. Others are hell-bent on telling everyone online how terrible you are. Why?

First, understand the difference between a troll and a dissatisfied customer. When a customer has a negative experience at your store and turns to Yelp to voice their dissatisfaction, this is legitimate. They can clearly state facts about when they visited or purchased a product from you. Even if they deliver a severe take-down of your establishment, the criticisms they offer may be real, and they may be opinions you can learn from, even if you don’t agree.

How Can You Tell You’re Dealing with a Troll?

The main difference between trolls and actual unhappy customers is their intention. Even though the dissatisfied customer may say hateful things that resemble trolling behavior, it usually is related to their experience. The business didn’t meet their expectations. They can clearly state when they were at the store or restaurant. In addition, they have a specific problem that they want to complain about publicly.

On the other hand, trolling is vague. The poster usually doesn’t detail when they received a product or service from the company, perhaps because they never did. They don’t offer many details about why they have a negative view of the brand. They make inflammatory statements to elicit reactions. They may attack the character of the people who own the business. Their exaggeration is so great it’s plainly obvious. They’re also more likely to use curse words and have bad grammar.

So what’s a business owner to do?

1. Don’t Feed It

Trolls want an audience, and if you give them one, the trolling only escalates. This leads to the first and most important strategy for handling online trolls: Don’t feed into their behavior.

Ultimately, the troll wants to embarrass and shame you. If you play their game, you’re bound to lose, because you can never win an argument with a troll. Even though what they write may bring out strong feelings to the contrary, never post when you’re feeling angry. A clear, thought-out response is essential to combating online trolls.

2. Form Brand Responses Ahead of Time

One of the best ways to prepare for troll attacks is to plan ahead. When you formulate a friendly, common sense branded response for negative comments in advance, you don’t have to worry about writing an individual response to that particularly awful personal attack you just read. You can simply tweak the response you have, then post.

When you respond publicly with a straightforward attitude, you’re offering an effective compare/contrast opportunity for future customers who happen upon this unfortunate online trolling review. They are able to see your grace and humbleness. And most of the time, the troll is the one who leaves a negative lasting impression, not your business.

3. Always Try to Address Negativity Offline

Whenever possible, try to have personal conversations with all your negative reviewers offline.

Tell the reviewer that you’re sorry they have such a negative view of your service or products, and you’d like a second chance to make things right. Give them your contact information and encourage them to reach out to you. This gets the negative dialogue out of the public sphere.

4. If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say …

It’s essential to stay positive in every interaction you have with online reviewers, whether they’re happy or unhappy customers, or simply online trolls. If a troll responds to your response, consider answering once, but don’t engage in a lengthy back-and-forth.

The more you’re required to respond to negative, baseless claims, the less likely you are to word your response in an open, positive way. If you’ve said all there is to say and you don’t have anything else nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

5. Be Factual

The easiest way to expose a troll’s lies is to combat falsehoods with facts. If you encounter online trolls who enjoy spreading rumors, understand that all rumors have a shade of truth. Otherwise, they wouldn’t spread.

Address the factual part of the statement. By confirming what the troll, the online audience and you know to be true, you establish your credibility. This makes it more believable when you go on to address the false parts of what the troll is posting.

6. Show Others You’re Listening

Regardless of how you feel about online trolls, it’s important that other customers on the web see that you’re able to respond with patience.

It might be obvious that the poster clearly harbors a personal vendetta or is just trying to stir up a controversy. Still, when you respond in a way that shows you’re listening, you’re acting as an ambassador of your brand and you’re upholding your business’ values.

7. Report and Block if Need Be

Many experts say even though you may think you can spot trolls easily, your best bet is to treat every negative comment online as if it were from an actual customer, just in case.

Always draw the line at abusive, offensive language, especially if it’s being posted on a platform you control, such as your company website. You can report and block users on social media who troll using vulgarity. Threats, hate speech and any other inappropriate content will get them booted off most social networking platforms and review sites.

Your Best Defense: A Strong Offense

The ultimate way to combat online trolls is to work to establish a solid, positive digital reputation for your business long before the haters show up to tear you down.

With the help of Accrue Reviews, you can work at consistently soliciting feedback from your satisfied customers in order to show the world the exceptional level of the product or service you provide. Contact us today to learn more!

Is Yelp a friend or foe?

If you’re not on Yelp, you’re missing out on countless local marketing benefits for your small business. Even though it started small in 2004, today it’s one of the top sites consumers look to for online reviews.

If you’re ignoring Yelp, consumers may be ignoring you.

It’s a Big Community

As of December 2016, Yelp hosted an average of:

• 24 million unique mobile app users per month
• 65 million mobile web users per month
• 73 million unique desktop users

And 121 million reviews were posted at the close of the fourth quarter of 2016. It’s a large community and it’s only been growing since its inception. It’s highly likely that your target customer base is on this site, but is your business?

Google Search Likes Yelp Reviews

Google wants to deliver the best results to its searchers. Because of this, it prioritizes showing businesses with positive reviews. Even though Google has its own reviews platform, you can still expect highly rated Yelp businesses to pop up on the first page of Google search results, especially when consumers search for local shops or restaurants near a specific location.

Users Have the Intent to Spend

It’s fitting to call Yelp users “consumers,” because according to 2014 data, 80 percent of all Yelp users who visited the site or used the app intended to make a purchase. There are 10,000 weekly food orders generated from Yelp and 200,000 calls to local businesses from the app.

On average, a business’s annual revenue increases by $8,000 when they have a Yelp account. When businesses advertise on Yelp, average annual revenue increases by $23,000.

Positive Reviews Are Trustworthy

An estimated 84 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, but that number may be higher on this site. About 90 percent of Yelp users report that positive reviews influence their purchasing decision. And 93 percent of people who researched a business’s reviews end up spending money at that business.

Yelpers like Yelp, and they’re more willing to trust your small business when you’re on Yelp.

It Puts You on the Map

In 2014, 200,000 sets of navigational directions originated from the mobile app. Consumers are using Yelp at such an increasing rate that car manufacturers are beginning to add Yelp-integration to mobile navigation systems. You can add your exact location and your business hours and ensure customers know how to contact you and when you’re open. Having a profile helps local consumers find you both digitally and physically.

What Are You Waiting For?

It’s time to build your small-business Yelp profile and start collecting the online reviews that will seriously boost your business’ visibility and profitability. Contact Accrue Reviews today to learn how we can help.