Customer Testimonials are important for your business. It can be seen as a part of communal marketing. These testimonials are beneficial for the marketing and promotion of your product and services. There is no better way to market than by word-of-mouth.
One of the question that comes into our mind is, how do you get credible testimonials? Below is the list of some of the sites from where you can collect reviews from all around the world, as well as information about how to encourage reviews from your customers?
1. Facebook Reviews– For local businesses you must have facebook page. Facebook page comes with posting on walls / commenting on the post. You just need to slide this tab over into your visible tabs and encourage your fans to write some reviews.
2. LinkedIn Recommendations– LinkedIn is a social network which can be a big source of reviews, extracted from your recommendations.
If your company has many employees then you must encourage all of them to be active on LinkedIn. This is beneficial for employees as well as for your company. Individuals can get recommendations from customers and with their permission, you can use these recommendations on your site.
In case of indiviuals like doctor, freelancer,etc. running their own business, all the reviews are for themselves.
3. YouTube Video Reviews – People remember more what they viewed as compared to what they read. You must encourage your customers to add videos to their own youtube account about your offerings and how they helped them. And then let you know about the link so that you can add these videos to your channel.
You can even keep a Flip camera in your office and reviews to add to your own Youtube channel.
Experience LG channel is an example of customer review video collection. It has reviews for home entertainment, mobiles phones, computer products, etc.
4. Local Search Directories– There are many local search directories such as Google Places, Yahoo Local, Merchant Circle,etc which allow their network members to write reviews about the local businesses. If you have good reviews on such sites you can use them.
Many of these sites are interconnected. Google gets reviews from Google users, as well as from other local search sites like Yelp. Writing reviews on these local search sites will help you to get more Google search traffic for your business. To get reviews from these sites you must claim and update your listing on them.
5. Niche Review Sites – Niche Review Sites are also helpful to get reviews for your businesses. Depending upon business you are in, you may get reviews from these sites.
For example in case of hotels you may get great reviews from many sites such as Trip advisor, Travelocity, as many people visit these sites over the hotel’s main website.
6. Rewarding Customers Who Review – You can reward your customer by offering them some incentives for their reviews. Even local search directories allows you to share coupons or discounts on their sites.
You can offer some incentives to those people made video reviews for your business. You can write special coding on Facebook which will allow you to share some special offers with your fans.
7. Google Alerts and Social Mentions – You can keep a track of brand mentions including your name, business name, brand, and specific product names, and product reviews by setting up daily notifications via email on Google Alerts and Social Mentions.
You can use these alerts to find reviews and can even ask people who have mentioned your brand if you can feature their comments or story on your testimonials.
After collecting all of these great reviews add them to one page on your website.
Don’t forget to give credit for the reviews to the sites they came from, as this may encourage people to add more reviews. If necessary ask the person who wrote the review to add them on your main site.
There is one disadvantage of writing reviews on your Facebook page, local search directories, and other sites and that is you don’t have any control over people reviews they can be either be positive or negative. If you come across any negative review about your business, it is necessary for you respond to it. Your response to such negative review will lead to a positive impression on people.
Now it is up to you. How do you get your customers to write or record reviews about your company?