What Are Online Reviews?
Online reviews are mostly written by customers that are intended to influence small business owners and potential clients. They are left on websites which eventually appear on search engines like Google and Bing.

You must have both high-quality reviews/ratings and a lot of reviews to succeed. Your reviews can play a huge role in a potential customer's decision-making process.
Having a 5-star review rating means nothing if you only have a couple of reviews. You must have a decent quantity of reviews in order for people to feel your rating is credible.

Which one of these 3 companies would you contact first? I think most people would reach out to the company in the middle with a 4.9 rating from 59 reviews. Their other two competitors in this search aren't even close! The top listing is out with a 2.5 rating from 10 reviews and the bottom one has a 5-star rating but there are only two reviews.
Where Do People Leave Online Reviews?
There are two main types of online reviews: social media and review sites. Let's look at both in a little more detail.
Social Media Reviews
Social media reviews are left on social media sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

Social media is one of the two main places you will find reviews online. Some social media reviews will actually show rating levels, but they can also be something as simple as a customer leaving a comment on your page or posting a status update with a #yourbusinessname.

Not only do you want to monitor your social media pages for activity and engagement, you want to monitor social media for mentions of your brand.
How Do You Proactively Get Online Reviews?
The way to get more online reviews is to put a system in place to consistently ask for reviews. I know this seems way too simple, but most small businesses don't ask for reviews which is why they get very few or none at all.

You can certainly do this manually, but it's much more difficult to scale and a lot easier to have things fall through the cracks. Fortunately, there are ways to automate review requests (check out some options in the list of tools near the end of the article).

No matter how you choose to do it, requesting reviews must become part of your sales and customer service processes. I would highly recommend automating your feedback process. It will save you and your customers time and it makes the process a lot easier.
Monitoring Your Online Reputation
Brand monitoring is defined as following online conversations about your company, product, or service by monitoring keywords relevant to your business. It’s also known as social media listening or web monitoring.

Proactively monitoring online conversations about your business gives you a real-time view of your online presence. You will know what is being said and where things are being said so you can proactively participate in the conversations.

You can also learn a lot from comments like what you are doing well, what you are not doing well, why do people do business with you, and a whole lot more valuable nuggets about your business.

In the tools section below I've provided you a number of choices to help you monitor your online reputation. This is not something you want to do manually and will need to employ tools to automate and make the process easier.

Monitoring your online reputation is the second piece to the online reputation management puzzle along with online reviews. You must have both for a comprehensive reputation management strategy.
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