A Business Owner’s Guide to Managing Online Reviews

As a business owner, you know the importance of online reviews. 

When a customer leaves a review on one of the popular sites, they are increasing your brand visibility, assisting potential customers in their decision making, impacting your sales, and increasing your local awareness. Good reviews can boost your business, however, bad reviews can have such an impact they lead to business failure.

For these reasons, managing online reviews is essential for the health and success of your business. 

Fortunately, monitoring and managing your business reviews doesn’t have to be a complicated task. By using a few tips and methods, you can protect your brand reputation online. 

If you want to manage your reviews but aren’t quite sure how, this short and simple guide is for you. 

Use a Media Monitoring Tool 

To better manage your online reviews for business, consider using a media monitoring tool. These tools monitor the popular media sites and give you an alert when your brand is mentioned. This is a great way to know what people are saying about your brand, without having to manually monitor every site. 

Learn to Navigate the Different Review Platforms

One of the best tips for managing your online reviews is to learn to navigate the various review platforms. You should learn how to look at filtered reviews, respond to customers, and everything else about the platforms. By understanding the platforms, you use them to your advantage when you are monitoring your reviews. 

Depersonalize the Review

A great tip for how to manage online reviews is to take the emotion out of it. While reading a positive review is ideal, you will likely see negative reviews as well. Learn to take your emotions out of the situation so you can handle the review in the best way possible. 

Respond to Everyone

A helpful tip for monitoring online customer reviews is to respond to everyone. Whether the feedback is good or bad, you should thank the customer for their review. 

If you have a bad review, apologize and post a brief solution to the problem. Make sure to maintain a level of professionalism when responding to reviews. 

Track Your Reviews

When customers leave reviews, they not only boost your brand visibility, but they also provide essential data. For this reason, tracking your reviews and analyzing the data is a good way to improve your company. You can supercharge your efforts by tracking your competitor’s reviews as well. 

Use This Guide When You Are Managing Online Reviews

By using these tips for managing online reviews, you can turn good and bad reviews into an opportunity to boost your brand. 

Start by using a media monitoring tool so you can be alerted of new reviews. You should also depersonalize the reviews, respond to everyone, and maintain a level of professionalism. Make sure to track your reviews and use the data to improve your business even further.

Follow these tips to properly manage your reviews.

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