Five Stars

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Five StarsIf you own a small business, you may live in fear of customer review sites. You know, those sites where people can give your business thumbs up or down, any number of stars, or write a review of your product or service. Whether you like them or not, they’re used all the time by would-be customers of your business. Perhaps it’s time you figure out how to play nice with them.

What Are Customer Review Sites?
These sites are pretty much just directories that let users leave their opinions about your business. And since they have a lot of content, someone looking for your business might find you in the directory before they find your actual website (in which case, you could probably use an SEO consultation.)

Some of the best known review sites include:

There may be other niche directories for your business area or local directories.

There are a couple of reasons businesses complain about customer review sites. First of all, no one likes to read that someone doesn’t like their service or product. Ouch. The second is that there are people who abuse the system because they want to make their competitors look bad or they are just malicious. There’s not much that can be done about this, however, because the sites aren’t going anywhere.

Make It Work
There are in fact ways to make these sites work in your favor.
The first thing you should do is get yourself listed on these sites. If you’re already listed, claim control of your listing. Take the time to develop your brand with the listing the same way you would your website or print media.

Make lemonade. If you get a sour lemon review, figure out what you can do to make an improvement. See if there are ways to respond to the reviewer, but only do it in a positive way. Negative reviews followed by a negative response from the business will only make you look worse.
If the review is not legitimate (you’re pretty sure it’s just a malicious attack), look into the policy for taking care of those types of complaints.

Ask customers to share the love. If you have a customer that constantly gives you great verbal feedback, ask them if they’d be willing to do the same online. Many would be happy to be an advocate for your business. You can even create fliers that you hand out with information on the sites that you’re listed on.

If you want to invest more than time (you know, money), you can often purchase advertising on these directory sites. This would allow you to really own the brand for your company.

Using these directories to your advantage is much better then fretting over them.

If you need more help with your social media strategy, Alphabetix can help you get the right message across to your potential clients on the web.

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