99.5% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase.
If you want to ensure you’re making a good impression, managing reviews must be a foundational pillar of how you manage your online reputation. Without a consistent influx of positive, authentic reviews – and without a way to respond to negative reviews – you’re throwing your business to the wolves.
To help you, we’ve compiled this guide on how to best manage and leverage online reviews for business success.
Table of Contents
Impact of Reviews on Business Success
First things first, if you want more reasons to prioritize review management, these numbers say it all:
- 66% of consumers ranked online reviews as the most influential factor on their buying decisions. Online reviews ranked ahead of search engines, ecommerce websites, and social media.
- Customers aren’t likely to choose a business if its rating is below 3.4 stars.
- Almost 100 percent of shoppers (96%) look specifically for negative reviews.
- One negative review can cost a business up to 30 new customers.
Ready to get started? Let’s look at the review platforms you need to watch.
The Main Players: Key Review Platforms
When target audiences want to know more about your business, they turn to these platforms.
Google Reviews
Google dominates search results and its reviews are pretty popular:
- 57.5% of all online reviews are on Google.
- 67% of consumers trust Google-based reviews the most.
With such high visibility, these stats are great if your Google reviewers are happy, but much less so if the opposite is true. This brings us to damage control:
Can you delete Google reviews?
You cannot delete Google reviews simply because they are negative.
Here’s what you can do:
1. Flag reviews that violate Google’s policies. For a full step-by-step guide for how to report policy-violating reviews on your Google Business profile, follow this link. Violations include but are not limited to:
- Fake reviews
- Reviews that spread misinformation
- Any review that uses harassment, hate speech, offensive content, illegal content, or shares personal information.
2. Respond to reviews. Customers expect brands to respond to reviews – positive and negative – and a failure to do so can increase churn by 15%. On the other hand, responding to reviews faster and more consistently improves customer satisfaction and makes a brand more attractive to new audiences.
3. Encourage positive reviews by giving stellar service and offering review incentives. Discounts, anyone?
Facebook Reviews
Business reviews on Facebook are only available on the Facebook app for both iPhone and Android. While there is still an active review community on this platform, in 2023, 43% of U.S. consumers said they find the information they see on Facebook to be untrustworthy.
How to remove Facebook reviews
If you’re bothered by negative reviews on Facebook, you can:
1. Report a review if it goes against Facebook’s Community Standards.
2. Respond to negative reviews. Google doesn’t have a monopoly on this service. No matter where reviews are left, responding to them promptly and with courtesy does a fair bit to help improve your reputation.
3.Encourage positive reviews. Improve your service and products and people will brag about you.
Reddit Reviews
Reddit is quickly growing in popularity. The site had around 1.1 billion monthly unique visitors in January 2025, up from 864.6 million in January 2024.
These visitors are busy. You can find a subreddit for just about any topic under the sun, and Reddit users don’t hold back when it comes to sharing their opinions.
Can you remove a post from Reddit?
Just as with the other platforms on our list, you can’t delete Reddit reviews left by other users. The user who left the review can delete it, however, any replies made to the deleted post will remain, unless the users who replied also delete their comments.
What you can do:
- Respond to reviews, if appropriate.
- Engage with audiences proactively by starting your own subreddit to share interesting, funny, wild, or heartwarming firsthand stories about your business.
Industry-Specific Platforms
Our final tip in this section: It’s important to identify any industry-specific platforms being used by your audiences. Think: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, etc.
Your online reputation depends on you regularly monitoring all reviews. You need to have a handle on what people think of you and that means all people, not just the ones using Google, Facebook, or Reddit.
This is necessary for two reasons:
- 59% of consumers like to check more than one review platform before making a purchase.
- Generative AI tools pull information from everywhere they can get it. With more and more people using these tools, you need to cover your bases.
Review Management Best Practices: Taking Control of Your Narrative
Now that we’ve covered some of the top platforms and you know where to look, what do you do with the results?
- Be proactive. Establish regular procedures for reviewing all relevant platforms.
- Respond to reviews – both positive and negative. Responses should be prompt and professional. It’s okay to use a template to get you started, but take care not to sound like a robot. It’s individuals leaving the reviews and they want individual, personalized responses back.
- Address negative feedback constructively. This is your chance to share your side of the story. For example, have you made changes addressing any complaints? Let people know.
- Show you value customer feedback.
- Thank reviewers: This makes your business seem more personable and focused on customer satisfaction.
- Share positive feedback with relevant employees and departments to give credit where credit is due and boost employee morale.
- Compile the information from reviews – both positive and negative – to determine where you shine and where you need to improve. Then act on the information.
- Share positive reviews. Audiences trust their peers more than they trust you. Showcase positive, authentic feedback and let people know you’re a brand to trust.
- Stay adaptable. Ten years ago, Reddit wasn’t as powerful as it is now. By paying constant attention to the review landscape, you can keep up with the trends and take proactive steps to engage audiences and reviewers.
Tools for Managing Online Reviews
Looking for automated support? Broadly speaking, you have two types of tools to choose from when strategizing online review management.
1. Social Monitoring Tools
These tools help you both track what audiences are saying about your business on various review platforms, social media sites, forums, and blogs, and respond to these reviews. These tools will alert you to mentions of your brand name and product names.
Social monitoring is important because it brings efficiency and speed to online review responses. As we’ve shared, marketing teams have a lot of territory to cover when it comes to review management. They don’t want to miss a question or comment, nor do they want to take too long to respond. Tools that identify all brand mentions ensure that nothing – and no one – falls through the cracks.
2. Social Listening Tools
Social listening tools clue you in to the many conversations focused on and related to your brand. This includes identifying:
- Tagged mentions of your brand
- Untagged mentions of your brand
- Commentary about relevant industry events
- How audiences interact with your competitors
The goal with these tools is to identify overall customer trends that you can use when creating ad campaigns or other marketing materials. They will also help you identify any potential gaps in your messaging.
The Difference Between Social Monitoring and Social Listening
In a nutshell, these are the differences between the two types of tools:
- Social monitoring gives you a MICRO view of individuals’ opinions, while social listening pulls you up to the MACRO level, allowing you to see the big picture of how audiences think of you and your industry overall.
- Social monitoring is REACTIVE. Customers share their reviews first and then you get to respond. Social listening is PROACTIVE. It gives you a chance to identify feelings and trends and respond to them before concrete opinions are formed about your business.
- Both tools are AUTOMATED and MANUAL. Whichever tool you choose will rely on automation to find reviews, mentions, conversations, etc. After you have the information, the tool may automatically suggest strategies, but at some point, you will need to manually craft responses to reviews and design relevant ads. This mixture is a good thing. Automation can make the process more efficient, but always remember audiences expect you to bring an authentic, human touch to your work. Don’t let them down.
Bottom line: We recommend both.
Tips for Getting More Business Reviews: Proactive Strategies
If you want to generate more positive reviews (and who doesn’t?), may we recommend:
1. Focus on providing exceptional customer service at all times. Identify standard industry procedures, and then identify what you can do to stand out. This can be as simple as promoting friendly service, or as grand as making an elaborate customer recognition wall for your online or brick-and-mortar stores. Whatever you decide to implement, be sure it’s sustainable for your business and employees. Anything too complicated or extravagant is too likely to eventually cause problems, which is the last thing you want.
2. Ask! It’s okay to ask for reviews at carefully identified strategic touchpoints. This could be after a successful transition, a customer anniversary, etc. BUT be sure to respect your employees and customers. Don’t hound anyone, please, and whatever you do, do not require employees to leave positive reviews. This is a way to fast track reputation doom.
3. Make leaving reviews nice and easy. You can consider QR codes, but that’s not the only way to simplify the process. Ensure any forms are simple to move through, and don’t take much time to fill out.
4. Reach out to customers using email, SMS, and in-app messaging. You should be everywhere your audiences are – but remember, you don’t want to bombard them with requests.
5. Make it fun! Offer rewards for reviews and recommendations. 73% of consumers say they’d be motivated to write reviews if they were offered an incentive.
Your Reputation is All You Have
An efficient and effective review management strategy is necessary for business success. After all, if you lose your good reputation, it doesn’t matter how wonderful your products and services are – no one will come calling.
Ready to see change? Start improving your review management practices today. If you’ve got questions, we are always available to help.
