Reviews
Consumers rely heavily upon reviews when making decisions about which services and products to buy online. Especially online travel reviews or hospitality reviews are ever more available and used to make decisions by consumers.
However, the problem with these kind of reviews is that the writers of the reviews are usually the same constant users of a particular website. Yelp, for example, rewards a few constant reviewers with the status of Yelp Elite. This way, a certain type of people goes out there and constantly leaves reviews. The other problem is that the average person, who does not use Yelp too often, will only turn to Yelp or Tripadvisor if he or she is unhappy. This type of reviewer only leaves reviews of how he or she was mistreated and complains on the page.
This is why there are so many pages with an average of a 3-star review. The only way for business to fight this is to have employees write positive reviews, or even worse, to hire and pay a company that writes positive fake reviews for them.
For these reasons, online reviews are not an accurate reflection of the population that buys these products or services and therefore listings on review website have a very inaccurate scale.
Can Facebook solve this problem?
Lately, Facebook rolled out a new feature. 24 hours after checking into a location, Facebook gives you a new notification that asks you to review and share your experience about the place you visited. By having a notification appear directly in your feed, no matter how busy you are, if you have something to say about the business, you have your chance. This pushes the review process directly in front of the consumer, whether they were thinking about their experience or not. That means that if you had a good experience, you will share it. If you had a moderate experience that wasn’t pleasant nor bad, you will share what you went through. And Facebook keeps it simple because you don’t even need to write out a review.
Facebook has a much larger network (in terms users) than for example Tripadvisor or Yelp. Will this new feature therefore cause the reflection of consumers to be more accurate in the review-world? And will this put an end to fake reviews?
Sources:
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/how-consumer-generated-content-drives-brand-value-report/638378
Malbon, J. (2013). Taking fake online consumer reviews seriously. Journal of Consumer Policy, 36(2), 139-157.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/will-facebook-next-review-platform/173275/
