You don’t need to annoy your customers by begging them to write reviews of your company. Instead, you need to make it easy for them to write reviews on their favorite social media platform. You want to create a great testimonials page on your website, but you need to gather those reviews from their place of origin.

Review Platforms

LinkedIn Reviews

Companies and businesses can’t get reviews on their profiles, but if you’re a solo business owner like home inspectors normally are, you can extract recommendations from this source for your business.

If you are part of an organization with many employees, those recommendations could still end up on the company’s website.

You’ll only need to obtain permission from the employee, which is easy to accomplish. They’ll have more proof that they’re a stellar employee.

That’s always a good thing for employee morale. It could do much for the motivation of the home inspectors too.

Search Directories

One of the most popular review platforms is Yelp. Millions of people search Yelp for reviews before patronizing a business or hiring a company or contractor.

Google Places, Yahoo Local and CitySearch also enable customers to leave reviews for companies. You can steer customers to these platforms when asking for reviews.

They’ll show up as proof that your business appeals to customers. You’ll have to claim your business listing on the sites before customers will be able to leave reviews.

YouTube Reviews

A creative way to have customers review your services is through video reviews. YouTube is one of the most popular search engine platforms, and videos are a great way to provide good reviews for potential customers to see.

Customers can upload videos to their own channel and provide you with a link, or they can record a video and allow you to upload it to your company’s channel.

You could create a playlist of customer reviews on your YouTube channel, or you can gather them onto a page of your website.

Facebook Reviews

If you set up your Facebook page as a local business, you already have a way for customers to leave reviews. The Review tab needs to be added to your menu, but it’s a simple addition.

Encourage your customers to head over to Facebook to leave reviews. It’s one of the most used social media platforms on the web. Many of your customers will have access and know how to use it.

How to Encourage and Ask for Reviews

For the most part, customers generally don’t leave feedback for companies unless they’re unhappy. You have to encourage customers to leave reviews as well as asking for the place you’d like to see that review.

Make it Easy

You could direct your customer to LinkedIn, Facebook or Google Places to leave reviews, or encourage them to leave reviews on your site. The choice should be easy on your customers. If it’s difficult or time consuming, you’re less likely to receive reviews.

Reviews by Email

After you’ve provided your service to clients and given them your report, you can send them an email asking them to review your service. It’s important that you ask for reviews, or customers are less likely to give you feedback on your service.

Incentives

You don’t want to entice reviewers with free products or services since it seems as if you’re buying reviews. There are ways to ask readers for reviews that is more natural like through a monthly prize drawing from a pool of people who leave reviews.

Respond to Negative Feedback

While you might get some wonderful and complimentary reviews, there could be a few that aren’t so great. You should never censor negative reviews.

If they appear on your website or within your social network, you shouldn’t ignore them either.

Negative reviews are a chance for you to show potential customers how you deal with the customer.

Respond by asking how you can rectify the situation. It’ll show that you care about the happiness and satisfaction of your customers. That could lead to a positive impression.

Gathering Testimonials

After garnering a few reviews around the web, you should bring them all back to one central location. You will be able to direct new clients and potential customers to this page of your website.

While you don’t own and can’t control the reviews left on other platforms, this is where you can pull all your reviews that can have a permanent home. Make sure that each review platform is given credit for the review.

Customers are more comfortable leaving a review on their favorite platform. You should ensure that you’re business is available for review on many social media sites then you can gather them into one space for easy consumption by potential customers who are searching for home inspection services.

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