While social media Web sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have made it very easy for online business people to market their goods, it has also made it very easy for customers to express their opinion, their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with products and services bought. And because this will be published over the internet and will remain there forever it is of vital importance for a business owner to be very aware of what’s going on with his business and how it is functioning. These comments and reviews will not appear only in the blogs. The website owner will have to watch out for them on other sites like Twitter and Flickr and innumerable discussion forums such as epinions.com, MouthShut.com
The variety of opinions and reviews that may be given will surprise you. There will be compliments and positive reviews and don’t we all love them! But there will also be negative remarks and very often they are the best pointers toward what’s going wrong with your business and how you can improve it.
Besides looking out for reviews elsewhere you can make the job a whole lot easier if you built review/social functions into your Web sites and product pages yourself. Remember, you are not just looking out for reviews of your products but also for reviews about customer service.
You can also get a lot of feedback and reviews through question and answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers.
Other sites that will present insight into your business and how it is being run are Glassdoor.com and Jobeehive.com which cater to reviews from a completely different and perhaps unexpected quarter -your employees.
There’s another thing you have to monitor though, and that is the effectiveness of your social media strategy itself. It may prove to be quite tricky and at best is left to the experts. Don’t look out only for short term results such as an increase in profits. Monitor how your business reputation is faring-whether there is a positive impression about it or not. And here you use social media itself as an excellent review tool. There are excellent social media review tools on the internet. This may not be expensive but quite a good amount of time and effort is required. When your customers realize that you are listening to their complaints and suggestions and are acting positively upon them they will be only too pleased to continue interacting with you and patronizing your business.