Hey you..Be aware of fake online reviews

26-Apr-2016 05:08 PM Digital Marketing

Reviews are a great way to boost product sales. They give the customer a vivid idea of the product functionality. A detailed review can go a long way towards creating a positive brand image for the company. However, these days it's not uncommon to find imposters giving fake reviews to increase/decrease sales of home/rival companies.  

Increasingly, retailers and manufacturers ask their customers to write positive reviews of their products or services on various websites-sometimes offering a discount for doing so. Advertising and public-relations agencies have also gotten into the act of masquerading online as delighted consumers. Although these reviews appear to be genuine, they are not.  They often create huge problems for companies. Several fake negative reviews can seriously jeopardize the image of your business. Some of the steps you can take in identifying these fake reviewers and stopping them are as follows.

1. Observe the length and tone of the review

If the review is very short, it may be a fake one. In fake reviews, the aim of the reviewer is to affect the overall rating of the product, hence writing a review is secondary to him. He would only write 2 or 3 lines, simply because the review space can't be left blank. His primary aim is to give a fake rating for the product. Keep a minimum word limit of 100 words to filter these fake reviewers out.

2. Look for frequency of  reviews

If a book reviewer is being paid to write reviews, they may have written a great number of short, 5-star reviews for self-published or print-on-demand titles. It's important to detect these paid reviewers as well as the corporation they work for, and report them.

3. Examine the review's language

Most authentic reviews have a moderate tone in their appraisal. They provide specific information about how the item performed rather than simply using adjectives to describe how good the product is. This is a nice way to detect fake reviews. It's important to analyse the content of the review and filter out those that have excessive appraisal or exaggerated remarks.

4. Investigate the reviewer

Some sites like Amazon.com, cross-refer user reviews with their buyer database and label those people as "verified purchasers" of the merchandise that they're reviewing. It's important to check whether the user who is reviewing your product has actually bought the product or not.

Reviewing is one of the most important facets of the product description. Hence, it is pivotal to get it correct and authentic before moving on to the other details of the product.