Lates business owners email from Yelp contains detailed advice on solicited reviews. It they say don’t “ask” for reviews, but with this link to Yelp’s door icons it seems like they mean don’t actively ask for reviews. Rather promote your presence on Yelp and focus on making satisfied customers.
Don’t ask for reviews.
“The best kind of feedback is unsolicited. Don’t ask your customers to write reviews. “Yelp is a website where people read and write reviews about their favorite local businesses. Therefore, it might seem counter-intuitive that we actually discourage business owners from asking their customers to write reviews.
Why would an online review site discourage review solicitation? Two major reasons:
- Would-be customers won’t trust you. Let’s face it, few people would ask for a review if they thought there was any chance that review would be negative. Over time, these self-selected reviews create intrinsic bias in the business listing — a bias that savvy consumers (read: yelpers) can smell from a mile away. But no business is perfect, and it’s impossible to please 100% of your customers 100% of the time.
- The solicited reviews will probably get filtered, and that will drive you crazy. More often than not, solicited reviews get filtered. If you’ve never heard about Yelp’s review filter, or you’ve had a review inexplicably “disappear” from your business page, this video does a good job of explaining why reviews disappear and reappear from time to time. It’s tough to design algorithms that can tell the difference between a person writing fake, 5-star reviews about him/herself, and that same person handing their laptop to a customer and watching the customer write a biased review.
Yelp exists to connect people with great local businesses. This is achieved by providing people with trustworthy information about said businesses. If consumers don’t trust our content, people stop using Yelp, and everyone loses: consumers don’t have a resource they can trust to make spending decisions, would-be customers stop visiting your business listing.
There’s no silver bullet for a great reputation: the best way to succeed on Yelp is by focusing on great customer service (building out a robust business listing using biz.yelp.com’s free tools also doesn’t hurt).
There is a way to let your customers know you’re on Yelp without being overly solicitous. In next week’s Weekly Update, we’ll explain how. (Here’s a preview.)
