Can a business have too many positive reviews?

Published November 5, 2014 at 8:19 am

On the surface, it seems that having an overwhelming number of positive reviews of your company online only helps. After all, this proves that your business has reached a large number of people and successfully won them over.

However, Inc.com’s Laura Montini recently wrote about what she called a “bizarre problem” that Airbnb faced when it realized it was getting too many happy responses from users online. While internet marketers can’t control what other people say about, they do have tools at their disposal to correct this sort of imbalance.

In this case, the reviews specifically pertained to different comments left about time spent in rented spaces. When a property gets only positive reviews and no negatives, it presents a potentially uneven view of what that place is like. Montini writes about the measures that Airbnb took in response to encourage fairer representation.

“First, the company implemented a simultaneous review reveal process,” she writes. “This meant that neither hosts nor guests could view a review about themselves until they had written one. And second, the company tackled the ‘discomfort issue’ by offering a $25 Airbnb coupon to renters as an incentive for writing something–anything at all–about their stay.”

This has echoes for business marketing techniques, especially for those companies that also have too many one-sided reviews on their hands. But first, your business will need to find those happy customers to begin with, and a direct marketing system is useful for targeting individuals with a specific statement. You can also include the information customers need to share their experiences in these targeted messages, so the word still gets out to your potential customers.