Our topic again today concerns the Yelp reviews you receive as a property management company. We talked to you about Yelp a couple of weeks ago when we discussed the importance of responding to negative reviews online. Take a look at that video if you haven’t already done so. A new strategy has come up recently with Yelp and we want to help property managers understand why it’s important to respond to positive reviews too.
Most of you know by now that in property management, you’re more likely to have your positive reviews filtered than your negative reviews. What we want to let you know, is that one of the best ways to keep those great reviews from being filtered is by interacting with them. If you respond to a review, that makes it more legitimate in Yelp’s eyes. And/or, if you use one of the available buttons to mark the review as “helpful” or “funny,” that will add to your review’s legitimacy.
There are a lot of things you cannot control when it comes to online reviews. You cannot control the filtering process or the algorithms on the site. You cannot control if the person writing your positive review is new to the site and just created an account. You won’t be able to do anything about the number of friends the reviewers have and you can’t control whether someone has a lot of reviews to their credit already.
However, you can control your own side of things. Interacting with your reviews is one way to help yourself. Those reviews will stay relevant and visible on your site, and they’re less likely to get filtered by Yelp. You should absolutely go ahead and respond to any and all of your positive reviews and if you have some older reviews that have been filtered already – start responding to those too. Your response might be the one thing that helps the review show up on your Yelp page.
We do not think you should have your employees review your company. That’s never a good idea, and it’s not going to help you. However, if your employees and vendors and people you know well happen to be on your site, it doesn’t hurt for them to click the button that identifies an excellent review as helpful or funny. Those interactions are valuable too, and it will keep your reviews visible and unfiltered.
Hopefully, these tips will help you become more aware of how your reviews on Yelp work. Take your positive reviews just as seriously as your negative reviews, and continue interacting online with the people who have experienced great service from you.
If you have any questions about this, or you need a little help mastering the review process, please contact us at Fourandhalf, and we’d be happy to help you.
