Episode 190 – A Discussion on the Local Consumer Review Survey 2024

Hey everybody, this is Ken Tucker with Changecape Web. Welcome to this episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast. Today I'm joined by Ian, Jeff, and Paul. Welcome guys.

Thank you. Good to be here,

Yeah. Today we're going to be talking about and discussing a survey that Bright Local does every year that I think is just fantastic. It's the local consumer consumer review survey. And what they do is they, you know, they just pull together, you know, some really great information and insights about how consumers are using the review platforms, how businesses are trying to use the review platforms a little bit as well. Today, we're going to launch into that just a wealth of insights. We wanted to make sure that our audience has some things to take away because shockingly enough to all of us, I think, reviews are still not being fully taken advantage of by way too many small businesses and you know it's such a low-hanging fruit opportunity to help you with your local SEO. So we're gonna talk about that today. Paul, I'm going to start with you. So how are consumers finding and using reviews? I want you to kind of talk about what review sites are they utilizing,

How many different reviews do they typically look at? You know, what, you know, is there a popularity decline or increase with a particular set of review sites that you see? What are your thoughts about all of that?

Yeah, really interesting about people do use reviews and about 35 36% are looking at reviews from 2 different sites, about 25% are looking at reviews from 3 different sites. And if you look at the breakdown, when it comes to reviews, Google is king, about 80%, something like that, about 80% of people are using Google reviews. And then Facebook and Yelp is like 44 and 45%, you know, 44% Yelp, 45% Facebook. And I know Yelp has done some things in the past that have irritated people. I think they've tried to take steps to fix that. But, you

know, we run into this a lot where people like, I'm, I'm, I'm never going to deal with Yelp again, but you, I think you can't ignore Yelp and especially certain parts of the country where Yelp is just absolutely huge. So don't discount Yelp. But yeah, people are absolutely using reviews to make decisions. And they are looking at reviews on 2 or 3 different sites, but Google is the gorilla, if you will. So that people use reviews, and if you're not getting reviews and your competitors are, you're at an immediate disadvantage because when people are in this

buyer journey that we talk about all the time, And everything else being equal, if your competitor has more reviews than you do, and if their reviews are higher than, you know, their review ranking is higher than yours, so to speak, you're probably going to lose that business.

Did you see any trends in terms of review sites that tend to be trending down in terms of usage of customers or like a review site? You know, like, you know, we haven't heard a whole lot about TikTok now for about 6 months, maybe or so, but man, it was crazy a while ago. And everybody's like, oh my God, TikTok is gonna be the new platform that everybody's using and they're going to to find all these. Any trends that you see in terms of review sites or even a site like TikTok making starting? I know they

don't have a review process necessarily, but is that a place that people are going to?

Not, I mean, they, Not, I mean, there is about less than 25% are using TikTok And that's probably the younger generation. But then again, it's. God is tick tock even going to be legal? You know, I mean, that's, that's a whole nother issue, but it's something

to

think about. But, you know, there is 1 thing, it's local news. Not that that's necessarily a review platform, but they get information about businesses from, from local news. So if you, if you can get some kind of a spot on the local news, that would definitely help because that's about 40, 45% people are getting information from local news about local businesses. Instagram, 35%. You know, what's interesting is Twitter is like way down there, like under 20% of people get any kind of information from Twitter about the validity or trustworthiness of a business?

I was a little surprised that the number of people that look at multiple review sites. That really kind of jumped out at me. I mean, I figured if they found, you know, most people, if they found a site where there were just, you know, a plethora of reviews that were already there, that they would just kind of go and search through that site, you know, based on, you know, newest or lowest ranked or things like that. That really just going to jump out at me.

Yeah, 25, about 25% of people look at 3 different sites and 35, 36% look at 2 different sites. So yeah, that in itself tells you how important reviews are. People use reviews to make buying decisions.

Another thing that kind of jumped out at me is I was really kind of surprised at the number of people who use Facebook for reviews.

I know because

that is not my experience or the experience of you know the overwhelming majority of businesses that we have ever worked with. So that really kind of surprised me.

Yeah. I won't go into 1 of my Facebook tirades, but yeah, it's- It kind

of sort of just did.

But it's, when you look at it, what I found interesting is Google is 80% of the people use Google reviews. And then that just, that drops down to 45%, almost half on Facebook and then 44% on Yelp. So I think that kind of surprised me is that Yelp and Facebook are basically deadlocked when it comes to how many people are looking at those 2 different sites for reviews because You would think that Facebook would be higher When you look at their user base but there they're basically in a you know deadlock with with Facebook. But if

you're going to spend time and effort getting reviews, your priority really should be Google. That's kind of my takeaway on that. But what I did find interesting is that something else is that 25% of people look at 3 different sites for reviews. And then for 4 different sites, that drops down to 9%.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that also, for me, the 3 sites, 1 for sure, Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. But the 2 or 3 sites was a little bit of a surprise takeaway for me as well. But I think 1 dimension that's missing and I'm an engineer, those of you that know me, I'm an engineer by deep background, so I can geek out on data and numbers all day long. But 1 dimension that's missing for me, and I get it would just be too much, but is the demographic to age groups of the respondents.

And the reason I bring it up is it ties back to, you know, strategy first, know your ideal client, know your target market, and know where they get their information. Pick the review sites that are important to them. And I think having this overall sense that, yeah, Facebook still gets used. If your target market is Gen Z, it's probably not Facebook. It probably is TikTok. And I think another important point is that Some of these platforms are quantitative. You get the average review rating. Some of them are people are using them to go find reviews and

information, but they're not getting a star rating. They're just getting the authentic voice of people putting out videos talking about a product or a service. So I think that they all have their places, but you need to take it back to the target audience that you're after and pick and choose when you ask reviews, which we'll get to for reviews, which we'll get to later, pick and choose and ask for the right ones. But yeah, it is probably more than 1 and more than just Google. Well, yeah.

You know, you could probably infer some of that demographic data. I mean, if 80% of people are using Google, then that's going to cover a wide demographic. But yeah, I guess I think 1 of the things that really surprised me is that 20, 23% of the people use 1 site, whatever that site may be, but 36% are checking reviews on 2 different places. And 25% are checking reviews on 3 different places. Only 23% are only checking reviews on 1 site. So again, if you're a small business and you're not, you don't have a plan in place

for reviews, maybe we're going to talk about that later, then you're, you're making a huge mistake.

Well, and I think, I think the thing to remember why Google actually is so powerful, it's, It's not because they're Google, it's because of relevance, right? And I think that plays into also why people actually look at reviews or recommendations as they're called on Facebook equally to Yelp is because that's where they spend time. Jeff, you were talking about where does your ideal customer spend time if they're on Facebook? I mean, if you guys, some of us spend time on Facebook. And what I think is what I find fascinating, though, is that people will often ask,

like, who do you recommend for, or I'm in search of this, right? So they're going out to their connections on Facebook, on their social network, in this case, and asking, who would you recommend? And what happens is people will often share the link to the profile of the business or name the business, and you can go find it. And so they'll stay on Facebook and research it a bit. But the thing about Google is that it's all about relevance. And I think the really powerful element of it is it's relevant to the consumer because they're searching

for a solution that they're looking for. They have a need, a pain point. And then on the business side, it's not just about having great reviews. That's wonderful about having that social proof. But it's the power of those reviews on the Google platform that give you visibility in the marketplace, like no other platform possibly can, right? People search for solutions on Google and they are presenting reviews that help you make a decision. And I think that's the real key to it all is these are reviews are all about how do we equip people to make good

decisions?

Yeah. You know, 1 thing about Yelp, and I know a lot of people have a lot of really strong feelings about Yelp. Many business owners have very negative feelings about Yelp. But the reality is, Yelp is a juggernaut when it comes to search results. When you type in a search for almost any type of business, if you skip down below the Google Maps, which takes some effort, I mean, no doubt Google Maps dominates and that's where the Google reviews are going to come into play. But you almost always in 1 of the top 3 organic listings

is going to be a Yelp top list. And people click through that. So you know, so.

In some geographies.

Not in a lot of geographies.

I mean, if you're major metropolitan areas. If you're in a smaller, you know, 100, 000 person community, yeah, Yelp's not going to be nearly the factor. But if you're in bigger metropolitan areas, especially the coasts of the US, the East Coast, West Coast, the mountain states, you know, because a lot of people are moving from the West Coast to the US mountain, mountainous areas, you know, Boise, Idaho, Denver, you know, places like that. And in Texas and Phoenix, you know, Yelp is a juggernaut, but even if it's not in, it is going to show up incredibly

well in search results.

So- No, no,

only in some geographies though. I've tested it for clients all over the place and in some geographies like you're talking about super strong because they've created a beachhead there right so they that that helps them show up in search results

yeah

but you know yeah the other the other side that's interesting about Yelp is most people don't spend time on Yelp for any other purpose, but to search for businesses, right? So it's, it's in that way, if you've created a behavior in a particular area and the trust level for Yelp is high, then it's a fantastic platform. If that's not there, that's where, that's where you have to have some real business intelligence to make sure that you're not wasting money on a platform that's not going to serve you. If your ideal clients like Jeff said, aren't there,

there's

no point. I mean, just 1 last thing about Yelp. And like these other platforms, Yelp tries to be the most restrictive in terms of how does a business drive people to Yelp? Yelp really wants organic, natural behavior of people who use the Yelp app to go write reviews. That is not the case on any of these other platforms. And Yelp actually has pretty stringent policies. And that's why Yelp reviews oftentimes don't show up is because people try to manipulate and drive people to go write Yelp reviews and Yelp doesn't want to have any part of that.

It wants it to be an organic, user-driven experience from Yelpers. And you know, and if you don't fundamentally understand that, you're not going to have success with Yelp.

So to state that even more succinctly, can it's ask people to review you on Yelp, but don't get in the link to go do

it. Exactly.

They have to go there themselves. Before we jump to the next question, there's 1 more thing that kind of jumped out at me that I thought was worth mentioning, and that is the Better Business Bureau. It was on the list, but it was way down the list. And that's not a surprise. But I went back to the old data. They gave links back to 2017, which in internet years is forever ago, but really only 7 years ago, right? Better Business Bureau was the top review site. Wow. And now it's like, better what? And I think the

key takeaway there is for everyone, don't get complacent in where you're assuming people are going for reviews. Look at this kind of data. Talk to the experts. Follow the information. And again, go back to your ideal clients. Everyone's smile, ask them, hey, where did you find us? Well, you should always be asking that, but where do you look for reviews, that kind of thing. And don't assume that the top 1 this year is gonna be the top 1 next year. Probably will be Google, but number 2, number 3 are probably going to jockey around and always

be factoring that into, you know, how we adapt and change things and approaching marketing.

Yeah. And as you said, Jeff, you know, you got to understand your ideal audience. I mean, if you know your ideal audience are just fiercely devoted and advocate, you know, what's the word avid users of TikTok, you know, you got to you got to take advantage of that. And so so That was a great point. I'm glad

you brought that up.

I want you to kind of pivot here and let's talk about what are the most important review factors that are out there. Can you just kind of go through some of the things that were in the survey and also just kind of add your insights.

Yeah. Yeah, there's several. And again, it goes back to how are people using reviews? What do they want to get out of it? And what do they want to see? And really, the impressions they form of your business based on them. Responses is 1 big 1. People are expecting responses. And I think that's because it shows engagement. And as much as we think people just have their heads down in their screens all the time, they are looking for some kind of engagement. Digital engagement is a form of engagement, right? So responding to reviews is actually more

important than I had assumed it was. That was a takeaway for me. In responding to all reviews, not just negative ones, I think a lot of business owners may say, well, if it's good, I don't need to worry about it. I need to say anything. If it's bad, I need to try and do damage control. And there's a right and wrong way to do that, by the way. But responding to positive reviews is important, too. And how fast, how timely businesses respond comes into play. So kind of unpack that and dig through that a little bit.

And then even the way to respond, a lot of business owners might be, I don't know what to say, I don't know how to respond. So there's some insights we can gain from the survey made out in that. But in terms of the review factors that make people feel positive about using a business, because that's what we really want to do, right? We want to build up this body of reviews on multiple platforms, as we just talked about, for the purpose of helping people decide to come do business with you. In a little bit of that,

you can get into how you ask people for reviews. You can kind of suggest how they were things. You don't want to write it for them that needs to be authentic and genuine, but you can kind of say it would be helpful if you talked about these topics. It would be helpful if you mentioned whatever. But reviews that describe positive experiences and then the business owner responds to that positive 1 as well as the negatives are important. The star rating for sure has a bearing, but it doesn't have to be 5 stars. And in fact, there's

something to be said for not having a five-star rating. It's too easy to assume a 5 star rating means that you're just, you know, asking only the people that are going to give you 5 stars for reviews. Having a negative 1 once in a while that pulls your rating down a little bit can actually be a good thing. It shows that you're real. And then when you show in your response how you respond to it, that matters too. So yeah, prompting for the reviews at the right time. I know we're going to talk about that later.

Kind of asking for people to talk about the experience, responding to them good and bad, those are all factors that come in. Adding photos can help. There are some new tools that are coming out that use photos as a prompt for review. It's a photo to remind somebody of what you did for them, and then ask for a review at the same time. But people are really looking at the authenticity. They're looking at how can that review help them make a decision. And then, again, the positive experience is something like 69% of consumers feel positive about

using a business, if its reviews describe positive experiences. I mean, that kind of makes sense. And consumers will feel positive about a business if its reviews are written by named users. You know, maybe first name, last initial, but not just some random thing that they think could be a bot. In terms of the star ratings that people are looking for, Like I said, it doesn't have to be 5 stars. When the question was asked about what minimum average star rating a business needs to for a consumer to consider using it. If you're at even 4 stars,

you can catch 37 percent of the people that are interested in doing business with you. They would consider using you at 4 stars or above. And when you go to 4 and a half stars, that's 12%. When you go to 5 stars, that's 5%. So that totals up over half of the people that are looking at reviews. 4 stars or better, you can catch their attention.

That seems surprisingly low to me. I've seen other statistics that say if you're below average of 4.2, you're missing the lion's share of people who are willing to do business with you.

Yeah, their granularity was 4, 4 and a half. It was in half. So I think, you know, 4.2, 4, they may have rounded. Yeah. But I think the key takeaway is it doesn't need to be 5 stars. Of course, that's what you want to strive for. But I think, like I said, the authenticity, the genuineness as people weight it, having a few negatives to pull things down may not be a bad thing as long as they're addressed properly.

Well, and I think the other takeaway is you probably ought to work hard to try to get above a 4 star rating.

Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. I would still like to see, you know, 4 and a half or better use of 4.2,

but. Yeah, but 4 is kind of like the in my mind 4 is like the

minimum

the minimum that you want to strive for

Yeah,

yeah, yeah any lower in 3.9 doesn't look so good. Does it?

What about what about like the total number of reviews for a business any insights on that?

Yeah, it's you know, we're

very obviously based on the nature of the business, but

it's gonna Yeah, and it's gonna vary by the competition in your marketplace, too, I think, You know, if you're in a smaller market, whether aren't as many competitors, then maybe, you know, 20 or 30 reviews can get you by. But in general, it looks like it's between 20 and 100. Somewhere in there, the survey broke it down to 0 to 19, 20 to 49, 50 to 99. But that 20 to 49 bucket had just under a third in the 50 to 99 had a little less, not much, but they totaled over half again, almost 60% of

the minimum number of reviews that people said they would need to see to consider using a business. And I think part of that is if it's only a few, it's like, well, how representative is that really?

Right.

And if it's like sky-high, if it's like, you know, a thousand, it's like, yeah, well, what's that really telling me? I personally, I look at the distribution if there's a lot of reviews and I see kind of a sense of how the distribution is and I'll sample the top ones. I'll sample the bottom ones to see if there's any trends, but for the credibility and to get people's attention, the survey says, somewhere between 20 and a hundred.

Yeah. I think I would say

the biggest factor there too is your, your competitive set, right? Because First of all, you might not be visible if your reviews are that much, like if you only have, even though 20 to 49 is 30, you know, people want to see 31% want to see that much. If your competitors have 250 reviews and you have 49, The chances of you actually being in the competitive set and people seeing you drop so significantly that like you you got to be you got to be paying attention to your competitors and trying to Compete them from a review

standpoint as well, right? It's not always yeah, that's

that's a good point There's really 2 aspects that we're talking about here. And right, you bring up a very good point about the second 1, 1 is the visibility, will you even get seen so that people go look at your reviews? And that's, that's the competitive nature of the market you're in. And then the other is, you know, once people are looking at your reviews, how many do they consider enough?

Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, this this survey is really focused on consumer behavior, not SEO ranking factors, necessarily. Although some of that obviously does creep in. 1 of the things that I would like to have seen in this survey is, you know, breaking it out by, you know, by industry sectors, Because if you're a kitchen remodeler, you may do 6 to 12 projects per year. And that may be perfect for your business. But you're not going to be able to generate massive numbers of reviews if you're only working with 6 to 12 customers a

year because not every customer is going to go write a review for you and whatnot. But if you're

a restaurant

or a hotel, you should probably have thousands of reviews if you've been in business for a while.

We do see a little bit in the survey, a little bit, they break it out into like 2 buckets. I think, you know, restaurants, hospitality, a few other things were 1 and then services were another. Yeah, I think we may get to that in a second. But let me hit on a couple other quick things before we move too much further on The recency of reviews. So slow and steady wins the race is what I tell my clients. It's not all about get a lot of reviews and don't post any for 6 months, then get a

lot more. And in fact, the platforms may assume you're buying reviews if you do that. You want a nice steady progression upwards in review count, but that also creates recency, right? Most people want to see reviews that have been within the last couple weeks last month. Depending on the

page, that Ken's

Ken had good terms that he likes to throw out. The 1 I remember for this is review velocity.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You don't want that spike up down, that roller coaster, you want nice, steady.

Yeah. That's actually Google's term when you look at you know business profile optimization a Google business profile optimization, you've got prominence proximity and relevance and You know In that framework, that's where they talk about review velocity. I wish I could take credit for the term.

I tried to give you credit.

From the consumer behavior point of view, when consumers are making a decision to use a business, it's really again where the breakpoints over half of consumers want to see reviews within the last month. And part of that is, I think, if it's too old, is like, have things changed? Does it really matter anymore? If they were great a year ago, does that mean they're great now? I don't know. I want to see evidence and proof that they were great now. And to that point, when we go back to review sources, and I digress just briefly, chat

GPT was on the list of where people go to look for reviews, which kind of blew my mind because the AI, generative AI, the large language models are old data. If you ask ChatGPT for what's the best restaurant, you know, a Mexican restaurant near me, it's, Well, first off, they've got disclaimers now. It's going to tell you this is old data, and you should double check the current reviews. But yeah, the generative AI is starting to show up on the list. And I think as Google brings in SGE, a whole different topic will see maybe more

recency. But yeah, don't be thinking that generative AI is the place to go for reviews. On the other hand, don't neglect it either, because some people are looking, and it will become more important overall. Yeah, the recent C factor plays in there.

Yeah, definitely.

We hit on 1 more thing. If I can go back to the responses. Again, responding to both positive and negative. And again, if the assumption is that, hey, things are going great, people are leaving me positive reviews, I don't need to say anything about it. Change that mindset. Respond to positive reviews as well. Even if it's just a simple thanks, we appreciate you. We're glad you had the experience is what we strive for. Respond to all reviews, not just negative ones. And the negative ones respond in a positive way that tries to turn it around. Don't

get into an argument that's not going to end well.

Or just take the conversation offline. Demonstrate that you care, demonstrate that you want to reach out and work with somebody, but take it offline because you never know when you're going to actually be just pouring fuel on the fire.

Yeah, that's when I say, you know, respond to it in a positive, I mean, that's typically what

it is.

Hey, I'm really sorry you had that experience. Please give us a call. We'd like to talk to you more about it. You know that. Yeah. And then ideally, if you can turn them around with that client, that customer, then they can either retract or post the review. And that actually happened to 1 of my clients. They had a sales appointment just go terribly wrong. Sales guy was leaving, he was on his way out the door and he just didn't care. And they got blamed on Google, 1 star review, terrible this, terrible that, the other thing. They

called him up and they said, hey, we're very sorry, what happened? What can we do to make it right? And They had a conversation that the customer wanted to have said, yeah, I was a little hot headed and he took the review down. So those responses of trying to turn things around, can work and should be done. But you're right, can, you know, kind of say, here's what we're going to do and then take it offline and then go from there.

There was a surprising stat in there too about responses where they had tested out AI responses versus human response. Yeah,

yeah. And that people

sided with the AI responses, which I thought was quite interesting, because maybe part of that too is it takes the passion or the emotion out of responding sometimes, because some businesses don't always respond appropriate, right?

Appropriate. Well, it goes, so responses you need to respond. You need to respond pretty quickly. We kind of missed that point. It's like within 3 to 7 days. But yeah, if you don't know how to respond, then that's where AI can really help. Take a review, put it into AI and say, I'd like to respond to this. Give it a little hint in the prompts about the tone you want. I want to be friendly. I want to mention, you know, If you're not sure how to write, if you're not sure what to say, if that's just

not your thing, that's a great place to use the AI tools to help you out. And your writing, and they did a blind test where they put out 2 responses, 1 that was human written, 1 that was AI written. And the AI did a better job of writing than the human for that response. It was like, I think you had, it was a 58%, a 42% preference for essentially the same response. That was pretty cool.

Yeah, What's interesting is with AI tools, maybe an insider tip here is, when you write a review, you actually have an opportunity to add some SEO value to that review by the words that you use. And if you incorporate keywords and things like that. So what's what's what's great about AI responses is it takes the language of the customer when they wrote the review and it echoes it back to them in a really positive, but still sincere sounding way. Yeah. And it just generates additional content that can more than likely have some really good SEO value.

Mm-hmm.

So I think using AI for responses, especially if you're in a super high volume market like restaurants, I think it's almost a requirement to be able to use AI to respond in a timely manner because there is definitely an uplift as well from an SEO perspective, even though we're not talking about that necessarily today when you do respond to each and every review.

Yeah,

and let me be clear, we're not talking about an automation bot that connects in and responds to everything for you automatically. We're just talking about using AI to help craft the responses. As a business owner, you should still be staying in touch with the reviews and making sure that the responses are reflecting your brand and what you want to say and not just trying to connect everything in an automated fashion.

A good platform will have AI write a response for you.

Yeah, they'll have a

review it and prove it before it's...

Exactly.

Yeah. But that's perfectly okay with the review sites, at least with Google, I don't know about...

And just as an example, we were testing out some AI responses to reviews, and you have to watch, Obviously we're reviewing them before they went live But you know you have especially on Google Facebook some of the channels where people don't use their real names You know and if the person has their profile as popcorn chicken and you respond to that and say, Hey, popcorn chicken, thanks for the review. You know, it just looks stupid. So, you know, make sure you edit them just like these guys were talking about.

So Ian, let's, let's get to you. Talk about trust in business reviews. You know, there's a lot of, I think a lot of people use reviews and ratings and recommendations largely interchangeably. They do mean different things. So talk about, you know, reviews, especially versus recommendations, you know, that may come from other sources, online or offline. And Is there anything that the customers feel differently about whether or not it comes from, you know, recommendation versus an online review? And then also, are customers able to kind of sniff out fake reviews?

Sure, Yeah. So there is some data in the study about this. I think what's interesting, especially because we've all been in the industry for a while now, what I'd love to do is I actually love to compare studies because there was a study that had been done year after year after year, and I haven't seen the most up-to-date version of it by a different organization, where in their study, consumers valued online reviews, 80, 81% of them valued them as much as a personal recommendation.

In

this particular study, we're seeing something more around the 50% level, but it actually has gone up a little bit in the last year, where an online review means as, means as much as a personal recommendation from a friend, a family member, a colleague, 50% of the time, right, or 50% of the respondents. So regardless of what the exact stat is, it gives you a good range to realize as a business, wow, online reviews are super, super important, right? I think we've probably hammered that home today in another podcast, but you should not be ignoring these. Right.

Now, influencers, so it talked a little bit about, I trust consumer reviews as much as recommendations Recommendations from social influencers. I follow I thought this was interesting in that this was actually lower Than a personal recommendation from a friend or family member meaning the value of an online review was perceived as lower than, like it was 35% trusted an online review versus a social media influencer. So I thought that was interesting that they had put social influencers to such a high level. Another 1 that was interesting was I trust consumer reviews as much as professionally written

articles by topic experts. So again, this was around the 31% level. So this goes to support what we as marketing consultants talk a lot about, and that's putting out content that positions you as an expert in the field, because again, it surprised me a little bit that people put this on such a high level compared to reviews because it's quite different. And then the other 1 that was interesting was I trust consumer reviews as much as recommendations from influencers within my local community. And this was at 24%. So I thought that was an interesting 1 as

well. You know, the key thing here is, you know, if you can get recommendations from all of these, man, you're hitting it out of the park. The other thing that I think is interesting, this is more anecdotal and not from the study, at least I didn't see this in the study, was, and you guys probably experienced this as well, we talked a little bit about Facebook reviews and that kind of stuff, where they're more a recommendation. I personally actually see far more spam on Facebook reviews than I see anywhere else. And I find them far less

impactful, because I'm not necessarily in a buying decision when I might come across that information. Whereas with Google, you're making a buying decision at the time, right? You're searching for a solution.

Can I add to that real quick?

Absolutely.

So you had mentioned earlier, you know, about how people use Facebook to actually create a post and say, hey, I'm looking for a company that delivers this service in my location X. Yep. And this is not going to be a popular answer or a popular comment, I guess I should say. But honestly, I think 50% of the time why people do that is not, I mean, sure they may take the recommendations that they get, but they're just trying to find a way to drive visibility so that they show up in your newsfeed more.

Well I, again, this is personal anecdotal evidence. Like I see this all the time in my, the community I live in. Yeah. Because I'm pretty, I'm pretty tied in to the business community, but I'm also a consumer here. And what I find fascinating is that a lot of people do ask legitimate questions like, hey, what's the best pizza in town? Hey, who's the best chiropractor? That kind of stuff. And these are real consumers asking real questions. I wouldn't do that personally. Like I, you know, I would search on Google and look at reviews and I'd ask

friends and family. And, but that's what some people do naturally.

Yeah. And,

And it has a pretty big impact judging by the number of responses you see. Because for a small community, lots and lots of responses. People get passionate about their favorite pizza.

They do, for sure. And look, there's legitimate people who legitimately use it and are looking for input from their community. And if you're a part of a group, you're gonna get a more select set of answers. So if you're a part of a technical group on Facebook and you post a question about, hey, is this tool, do what it says it does and the responses you get from that community are probably you know Because you're you first of all you made the the step of taking trust to become a member of that community You know you

might take those a little bit more seriously I do think that there's a lot of people though, who literally they just ask those questions because they want the, because it builds engagement. Yeah. And it helps them show up in the newsfeed.

Right. So, so as an example, Ken, it's like me posting Like, hey, who's the best digital marketer in Bradford, Ontario, right? So, you know, hopefully people would support me and be like, oh, you are, but that and that looks stupid. Like, I don't know.

I just- But even if it's not self-promoting-

But I

have seen that, you're right.

I've seen it.

Even if

it's not self-promoting though, It's like, tell me the best roofer. You know, a lot of times people are doing that literally just to get visibility. Interesting. It's annoying. Anyway.

So I'll finish up my response because you asked about fake reviews as well, Ken. What is interesting in the fake review side? So, consumers definitely see fake reviews, right? I don't think that's any surprise to us. I actually don't know if they even provided, yeah, I don't think they actually provided like an aggregate, like, hey, this is the percentage of people that have seen fake reviews. But what they have done is broken it down by platform. So the most guilty platform is Amazon. That's not really in our topic today because it's all e-commerce, but necessarily. Facebook

is up there at 40%. Google actually dropped significantly. And I don't think, being in the industry, I don't think we're at all surprised by that because they've really crunched down on fake reviews, how reviews are posted. I mean, they went so far overboard that a lot of legitimate reviews were actually deleted, that a lot of businesses have experienced that. I know certainly I have, my colleagues and my clients have seen that. But yeah, I think there are fake reviews. I think what Jeff talked about where he said, this is how I look at reviews, right? You

look at the aggregate, you look at the top, the newest ones, you look at the best ones, you look at the worst ones. I think we as consumers have all become self-educated in a way or self-trained to how do we spot fake reviews? So I think that was 1 of the things in the study was that people are getting more savvy at spotting fake reviews, but also that the actual review sites are getting better at clamping down on these as well.

Yeah, yeah.

There was 1 other thing where it asked, what would make consumers suspicious about reviews as fake? And some of it was like if there's a star rating but no words, right? I think we all are a little suspicious of those. If the review was obviously written by AI, which was interesting, how you know that if it's a well-written AI response, I don't know, because they're made to mimic humans, right?

Oh, the other 1 showed that, you know, in responses that people couldn't tell it was AI.

Right, right.

If you don't edit

it, though, I mean, AI sometimes, you know, we'll even start up. Sure. You know, or right, they'll echo back the question. And if you're literally just copying and pasting and not paying attention,

right. And

it said it feels like the way they worded it is that the review feels like AI response So yeah, if it if it's just obviously Not human right? I think people are like, You know get out of there.

Yeah Paul, you know, there's actually before we jump real quick there's 1 other thing in this section that kind of jumped out at me which was big brand the rebel yeah,

that was

big brands versus local branches in the takeaway here for me is that local branches, even if I think a lot of franchisees may be like, Oh, my franchise does all the marketing, franchisees, the local locations still need to take control of their own reviews. You know, they need to make sure that what's being said on social media and and especially on the reviews is Relevant to them and they need to engage and still do their responses and if their franchise doesn't let them They probably need to have a discussion with the franchise and show them this

data

Well in general local franchisees need to take ownership of their marketing period. Franchises are great at providing some flyover and some cover, but to help you excel on a local market, almost every franchise sucks. And they do what's good for the franchisee.

Right.

Yeah. And some franchises make it very, very challenging for the local businesses to do their own marketing. Right.

That's kind of the point I was going after. Yeah, they provide a lot and here's what you do. Now You go spend your own money and do it, but they don't have a lot of control. But on the review side, especially, the local franchisees need to make sure that they're on top of that, managing the reviews themselves. That can't be done from a corporate office.

And the additional point that they made in this, Jeff, I think that was really, really powerful was that 91% of consumers say that the local branch reviews impact their perception of the wider brand, right? So that's why the bigger brands should be taking this seriously.

Yeah, it goes, goes both ways. Yep.

Yeah. Yep. Paul,

I mean, we're getting fairly close on time here, so we need to be pretty quick because there were a couple of other points that I wanted to make sure we kind of talked about. 1 is how are consumers writing reviews? Are they writing both for positive reviews and for negative reviews? Is there any skewing 1 way or the other? And also, how are they being prompted, if at all, to go write those reviews?

Yeah, I'll try to go through this pretty quick because they provided a lot of data on this, you almost write a book on it, but I think

I did.

But yeah, they, what's interesting. They broke this down from 2022, 2023, 2024, which, you know, we're only a few months into 2024. But what's trending up is people that only leave reviews for a positive experience has gone from 34% in 2022 to 38% in 2024. So people are, they're leaving more reviews. What I guess what struck me is that people that only leave reviews for a negative experience is much lower than what I've seen in other statistics from 7% in 2022 to 10% in 2024. People that are leaving reviews for both a positive and negative experiences

actually dropped from 33% in 2022 to 20... Was it 20... 28% in... Or 25% in 2024. So that kind of stuck out to me because the other statistics I've seen kind of contradict that. But

how?

I mean, like what? I mean, I've always seen that people, there's a skewing factor of people writing negative reviews much more commonly than writing positive reviews because, you know, we're psychologically wired to remember those negative experiences more deeply. And, you know, and we want to share those with people to protect other people. And it's driven by deep psychological makeups of just the way we're wired as people, most people.

Yeah. And what what they're saying is that people that leave reviews only for a positive experience is at 38 percent and people that leave reviews only for a negative experience is at 10%.

But that's only right? I mean, so

yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

But people that leave reviews for positive and negative has actually dropped from 33%.

Yeah,

to 25%. So I thought that was interesting.

That still doesn't really answer the, I think the deeper question, which is, okay, I go write reviews. I write Mostly positive reviews, me personally, but I do write some negative reviews sometimes. So I write both, but it doesn't show cumulatively of all reviews how many people are going to be driven unless they're prompted to go write, you know, a review 1 way or the other.

Well, yeah, I

think that's my takeaway is that consumers are writing positive reviews. So if anyone has the impression of like, oh, I don't want to ask because they won't do it. And they might write a negative 1, you know, you get what you ask for, right? We're going to talk about that in a minute. But right. Well, we'll write positive reviews. You just got to ask for them.

Yeah. Well, that goes to the second part of your question, are they being asked? Well, it doesn't break down how often they're being asked. Well, it kind of does a little bit.

But A

couple of things I did find interesting is that, and I don't know if I should go into this, but how many businesses are using so-called prohibited methods of asking for reviews has gone up drastically. I mean, and I won't break that down because like I said, we're running short on time. But yeah, they are being asked to leave reviews and. How?

I think Jeff's going to cover this, isn't he?

Yeah. Is there any notion how, I mean, are people being asked in person? Are they being sent emails, texts? I mean, any feel for that or any change in trends on that?

Yeah, and that's something else that's interesting is that via email has actually dropped from 34% to 32%, which isn't drastic, but in-person has dropped from 33% to 28% through social media has dropped from 31 to 27. But here's the thing, and we've talked about this, about the power of text messaging, that has increased from 23% to 26%. So yeah, they are being asked for reviews on a, and 1 of the things that kind of struck me on a business card is actually increased from 8% to 13%. So It doesn't break it down, but I guess maybe

they're putting a QR code on their business card, but something like that.

We recommend that to our clients.

Yeah. I've advocated, there's a right time to ask for reviews and depending on the business, 1 of them is that time of service, when the service is completed and somebody goes, oh, that looks great. And if you ask them for a review, then they go, yeah, I will when I get home, but then they forget about it. But you give them a business card that specifically is geared for how to leave a review. Then when they get home and they empty out their pockets, they go, ''Oh yeah, I said I would do that. I need to

go do that.''

Or even better, if you're a home service business, like you just cut down a tree for someone, you cleaned it up perfectly, you're showing it to them as you're leaving, you give them the card like, Hey, you sound like you really appreciated our service today. Do you mind leaving us a review for the next person? Right?

And you can even work playing around with some tap cards to do that. Right?

Yeah, you know, NFC technology, literally, you know, they tap their phone to a card and it pops up the Google review window right then and there. And what's great about that is you can ask, look, life gets in the way, right? I mean, that's why most people never wind up getting around to writing a review. If you're doing it at the conclusion of a successful experience for a customer, there's not going to be a better time to ever get it done. And you want to take the friction away from that. So you got to get over,

First of all, asking for the review and second of all, removing as much friction from it as possible.

Yeah. Well, and then you send a text message follow-up, but the other thing is if they're asked for a review, 19% always left to review and 26% left to review more than half the time. So you have to ask.

And it's okay if people don't write reviews. It doesn't mean that they didn't like you or that they had a bad experience. It just means life gets in the way, you know, and there are a lot of other competing things that are asking for their brain power, right? So, yeah, get over it. Jeff, I wanna get to you.

Yeah, I'll try and be quick. I think the key point. Yeah, I mean, I think

the essential thing I want you to really focus on is, are businesses offering incentives to write reviews? And What in the world is, you know, what is your thinking on that? And what is, you know, what is the policy behind that? Because people need to understand this.

Yeah, it's 1 that I want to make sure we didn't miss either. So the question was, do consumers recall being incentivized to write a business review. So incentivize means just, hey, write a review, we'll give you a discount. Write a review, we'll send you a buy 1, get 1 free, appetizer, whatever the offer is, write a review, we'll do something for you. I think businesses may not necessarily do this with bad intentions. It may be, hey, we want to just take care of our customers, our clients. But don't do it is the bottom line. Just Stop

it. It is almost banned. Depending on the platform, it can get you banned practice. Google has said there should be no incentivizing reviews. Don't do it. And if they find out, so that's the question, but your competitor could turn you in, right, then they can they can ban you. It even goes to the Federal Trade Commission level. It can fall into the deceptive practices category. If you're getting reviews that are cherry picked, or you're only asking for positives. There used to be, in a lot of the review platforms, and some there still are, this thing called

review gating. You ask a question in an email, how do we do? And if they click the 4 or 5 star button, you take them to the Google review site and say, please leave us a review. And if they click the 1, 2 or 3, you don't. That's deceptive right there. So don't incentivize, don't make offers for people to leave reviews. Some people would say, oh, as long as I'm not guiding them which way, it's okay just to get them to do it. No, no, even that isn't because there's a psychological low. If they're offering me

incentive, I need to say good things about them. So we can have unintended consequences. Just don't do it as the key.

Save it for your referrals.

Yeah.

Give people an incentive to refer you. Don't use it for reviews.

Exactly. But in terms of asking for reviews, yeah, absolutely ask for reviews. Don't cherry pick. Don't guide them 1 way or the other. Ask for reviews, you maybe can give them some suggestions about things to mention keywords, you know, it would be great if you could talk about whatever, but don't guide them toward, you know, any particular rating and do it at the right time and do it quickly. Do it within, I think the statistics are, needs to be within a week or so to catch most of the people that would write a review for you.

Even some things that should be the same day or within the next day, but certainly within a week. If you're a restaurant, if you ask somebody, if my wife said, what did we have for dinner last monday I can't remember it how am I going to remember to write a review if you're a restaurant it needs to be right away if it's a big you know construction project you know Maybe it's after they've had time to settle in and get used to it, but it still needs to be quick while the positive experience is fresh in

people's minds.

Ian, what are your thoughts about all of this?

Yeah, We've covered this really well, guys. I think we've done a really good job. The 1 thing I want people to get, if there's 1 nugget of information above and beyond, it's that consumers read online reviews. So 1 of the stats they provide is that it's broken down by always read a review, regularly read a review, occasionally read a review or never. And between the always and occasionally, so always, regularly, occasionally, it's 97% of all people occasionally do reviews, right? At least occasionally. And then if you only look at always and regularly, you're at 45%. So

if you want to connect with potential buyers, Don't ignore this. It's easy to do. It's just a behavior thing that you as a business have to really involve yourself in. Put some focus on it. Again, it's easy, very cost effective thing to do. Everybody should be doing it, I think.

Yeah, I think again, you know, look, I get it because I know I buy, the way I buy influences the way I sell. And so as a business

Owner, you know, don't let your own personal biases if you hate getting review requests, you know, because I mean, if you get if you go to a dentist's office or a doctor's office, I mean, you're just inundated with review requests. Yeah, Other industries are going to be equally as bad. I don't mean to just pick those 2 out, but I know from personal experience. And you know, that may shape my behavior to say, man, I hate asking for reviews. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be

that guy. I don't want to be that annoying factor. But the reality is you got to get over that because people do use reviews and they're willing to write reviews as we've talked about. So yeah, absolutely. All right, well, we're at an hour. So guys, thanks. This is a great topic, super important. I hope everybody takes this to heart and really tries to find actionable things that they can do immediately to help improve their businesses. And if you need any help, obviously, reach out to us. Or if there's anything that we covered that you want us

to go into more detail about, by all means ask us. Ian, you want to wrap us up today? Sure, thanks for joining us. And until next week, keep calm and Market on, folks.