Word of mouth is nothing new, in fact for many, many years we have relied upon the word of our friends or family, on where we hire services, shop, eat and to find out which people we can depend upon. The internet has brought with it a great many changes in terms of how we live our lives and chief among them is the way in which we spread the word about our favorite places.
These days, instead of telling people verbally what we love, we much prefer to share it on social media and through the use of online reviews. Online reviews however, can be hit and miss, take a look at this example. Myself and a friend of mine were recently searching for a new beauty salon to have some treatments done, I read some wonderful stuff about a local clinic and the Sono Bello reviews pointed me towards a salon which I have used ever since. My friend found even better reviews than I did, and we were both greatly disappointed by our experience. This begs the question then, can you really trust online reviews?
The Danger
The reason why a review can be glowing, when the experience is on the contrary, is because of a couple of reasons. The first reason for this is thanks to the ease with which one can actually leave a review. Because of the simple nature of this, it is easy for a company to set up a few online profiles and leave highly positive reviews about their own business, in order to drum up some customers and become more successful. The second reason could simply be that someone looks for different positives than you do, or that they are perhaps less critical.
How To Find Good Reviews
Avoiding falling into the trap is difficult, but there are some things that you should watch out for in terms of glowing online reviews. More often than not, you should look for actual written reviews, rather than simply trust a 5 star rating. Usually when companies want to leave reviews themselves, they won’t write anything but instead just give it 5 stars. In order to trust an online review, make sure you read through the comments, you will get an idea pretty quickly as to whether they are naturally written or not because some reviews can be fake.
Negative Over Positive
Another reason why you must be careful with online reviews is that humans are naturally more inspired to tell the world about a bad experience which we had, rather than a good experience. With this in mind it is a further indication that online reviews are not always inaccurate, but perhaps a little biased towards the negative.
Interaction
A great test of whether or not a review is real, is to see if any interaction from the business has taken place. Businesses can reply to a positive or negative review and if you see this, you should be far more trusting of what you are reading.