The times will change, and the topics will vary, but the one thing you can always count on is your business getting spam reviews.
The advancement of the internet and technology has brought incredible benefits to businesses. Through the internet and social media, we can connect with, and advertise to, anyone with an internet connection. We can utilize social proof (reviews from our customers) to help potential customers build enough trust in us to make a purchase.
However, anything as good as this will inevitably have a downside; for unlimited access to the world, the downside is spam reviews. You've likely seen them out and about on the internet, possibly even on your business page: reviews made by "people" (sometimes bots) who you have never done business with and who have no affiliation with your business.
Often spam appears ridiculous and obviously unsolicited–like reviews for a mystical cure for someone's lacking love life commented on an article about tractors–but other times, they could look authentic to a potential customer, which ultimately will be harmful to your business.
Many businesses handle spam by hiding and deleting comments, or they decide to simply not respond to reviews that they can't hide. Hiding and deleting comments, when possible, may be the best route to take. However, to someone outside your business, blatantly ignoring comments and reviews they can't hide looks bad, no matter how off-topic the review may be.
Like every business, we have faced our share of spam. Here are some examples of how we have replied to spam; our approach is to make our replies a little cheeky and humorous. We hope that potential clients scrolling through our reviews and comments will see that:
- Actual humans run our page.
- We know that the reviews are spam.
- We can address that the information in the review doesn't represent our company and offer correct info about what we do.
These are infinitely more useful to your company's image than just sweeping them under the rug. At the very least, we hope anyone scrolling by gets a laugh out of it.
Check out the lighthearted replies we've made to address some of our recent spam messages below.
If you need help addressing or managing your customer (or spam) reviews, book a call with us to learn more about our free and paid resources!
