Fake Reviews Can Endanger Your Business

A family-owned jewelry store had worked hard to build an excellent reputation over the years. Long’s Jewelers of Cambridge, Mass., achieved a strong reputation in the Boston area and an almost-perfect 4.8 star rating on Facebook. 

Then it received over 100 one-star reviews in the span of just a few minutes. Its overall rating plunged to two stars. The jewelry store says the reviews, placed by a competitor, were clearly fake. Reviewers had obviously fake profiles, lived in fake places and attended fake colleges, said Lynelle Schmidt, the jeweler’s digital marketer. Even worse, Facebook initially refused to respond to its complaint.

“I felt so crushed by this. As a social media marketer, I felt all my hard work go down the drain,” Schmidt wrote on the Inbound.org discussion forum. “Star ratings are crucial for retail businesses like ours.”

Her post requesting customers to post real reviews helped restore its ratings, and Facebook, prompted by the stir on social media, eventually said it would investigate the fake reviews.

A Major Problem

The incident highlights the problem of online fake reviews and the need to closely monitor social media to identify them. Reputation management experts now advise even small businesses to check the major social networks and review sites at least every few days.

A social media subscription service will promptly report mentions of your company and products. Free reporting tools like Google Alerts will not find all mentions, experts agree. Social media listening services check the depths of the major sites, reducing the number of social media venues that post local reviews that businesses must check manually.

Fake reviews are more prevalent than most people believe. They are often difficult to detect and counter. In addition, they can be debilitating. Research finds that star ratings are a primary factor in consumers’ purchase decisions. Even a drop of one star can seriously impact sales. A substantial problem for companies and their public relations teams is that negative reviews can climb quickly in search results, especially if more people add comments.

Spotting Fake Reviews

These are some red flags that help spot fake reviews.

Nothing else reviewed. One extremely positive or negative comment by a reviewer who has never reviewed anything else could be a red flag, according to Mashable.

Many at once. Many reviews posted almost simultaneously, especially if written in a similar style, could be false.

Oddly specific. Fake reviewers tend to write out full product names, even long ones, for SEO purposes. Legitimate commentators tend to abbreviate and use nicknames.

Superlatives. Fake reviewers commonly use superlatives and exaggerate, adds Bing Liu, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Look for descriptions of the “worst” thing to ever happen and excessive exclamation points.

Investigating social media profiles of reviewers can help show if they are legitimate. If the review seems to be written by a real person with a real gripe, then the business must respond and try to fix the situation. Fixing a problem can turn a griper into an equally-vociferous advocate.

Learning How to Respond to Negative Online Comments and the Techniques of Social Media Responding can be an enormously valuable skill within any organization.

A Research Opportunity

Rather than suspecting that all negative reviews are fake, treat than as market research and an opportunity, experts advise.

“The minute you see a bad review, look for a shard of truth,” Barbara Findlay Schenck, author of “Small Business Marketing Kit for Dummies,” told The New York Times. “Is this something you can improve? Look for what you can fix.”

Andrew Gruel, owner of the Slapfish restaurant chain, had slew of negative reviews that threatened his business. He responded by changing prices, increasing meal portions, introducing new menu items, and emailing customers. Five-star reviews began rolling in.

“You can get buried by bad reviews,” Gruel told the Times. “So it’s a race to stop the bleeding.”

Bottom Line: Fake reviews, often launched by malicious competitors or hackers on a lark, are more common than many believe and can severely damage even a large business. Recent incidents of fake reviews show that it’s essential for companies to monitor social media for negative reviews and respond to them quickly.