The Internet gives businesses big and small an opportunity for growth but it also has the power to ruin a brand overnight. Because of its influence, the Internet, particularly social media, is something that business owners shouldn’t ignore.

Good and Bad Reviews Need your Attention

Getting good reviews on sites like Facebook, Yelp, Google, and others is a good thing but what if you get one harsh review?

Every business should proactively manage the reviews they get from social media. Positive reviews are great for your image and can even influence purchasing decisions. Negative reviews, on the other hand, can hurt you and your brand.

Statistics show that 7 out of 10 consumers trust the reviews they read online. This means 7 out of 10 people would choose a business with good reviews over one that has a bad rating. In fact, if you get a negative review on Yelp, you’d feel its wrath from the day it was posted up to months or even years later. It’s difficult to remove a bad review until you get hundreds of good reviews to drown it out.

The question is, why do consumers trust online reviews? It’s all about time. Consumers have a limited amount of time most of the time. A working mom planning a birthday party for her child, for example, would want to make informed decisions about the venue, and the food as fast as possible. Reading a review about a particular venue or restaurant would help this parent a lot. Booking a restaurant that has good reviews will make it possible for her to avoid mishaps in terms of customer service and food quality.

Reviews Can Make or Break You

Consumers have been getting reviews of establishments and brands for centuries. The only difference is, we are now connected online and reviews of people we’ve never met are available to the public. Sites like Yelp, Google, Facebook, and others have made such information available to all of us and we can access them with just a few clicks.

Whether you’re looking for a pizzeria or an auto repair shop, you can be sure that you’d find a review or two somewhere. This means that a bad review can result to lost business and a bad reputation.

One bad review can make you lose customers and it is very likely that you’d lose these customers to your competitors.  If they get great service from them,  the good reviews that your competitors will get will only make you look bad in comparison.

If you got a bad review on Yelp, chances are, the reviewer also posted the review on Facebook, Google, and other sites. That could spell more trouble for your business. Do not fret though because there is a way to solve this problem. Experts say that businesses should respond to bad reviews immediately and try to address the problem the best they could. We know it’s easy to overlook one bad review though and for some, it’s much worse because they might not even be aware that such a review exists.

Review Fire gives you the power to see reviews about your business across a number of social media platforms. This monitoring system also makes it possible for you to respond to all reviews in one platform. If you are a business owner who wants all reviews consolidated in one place, ReviewFire is the answer.