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The Lifespan of Online Reviews and Social Media Posts

Alexander Zaugg, Founder

1 October 2017

We at re:spondelligent are convinced that any customer feedback is valuable, no matter which medium or channel it comes from. For a small business or a big enterprise, it is essential to protect and monitor their brand reputation as well as to collect and analyze customer data in order to improve their customer experience.

The amount of data, especially online, may be overwhelming; this makes it even more important to focus on the most relevant data and if necessary to use tools not to miss the essential insights.

In this article, we would like to show you why online reviews are more relevant for online reputation than Tweets and Facebook posts. Additionally, we discuss how you can make sure that you get new reviews using social media.

Why do online reviews have a bigger influence on your online reputation than Tweets and Facebook posts?

A lot of research has been conducted on this topic coming to different conclusions, but they all agree in one thing: online reviews have the longest lifespan or “shelf life”. That’s why it’s possible to say that an online review has a greater value than a Facebook post or a Tweet, as it stays relevant longer.

The Lifespan of Online Reviews:

According to one survey, users believe that an online review stays relevant for 3 months after it has been written. The most relevant are the reviews written within 2 weeks.
That’s near eternity in Snapchat time.

“Onlinen reviews stay highly relevant for 3 months”

The Lifespan of Facebook posts:

Another study shows that 75% of engagement with a post happens within the first 2 hours, but the relevance drops already after 2 hours significantly.

The Lifespan of Tweets:

A study reveals that an average Tweet has a prime of life of 24 minutes.

Key insights:

Online reviews not only have the biggest potential to provide authentic customer feedback, as they are based on real customer experience, but they also have the longest lifespan. So, it’s absolutely essential for any hotel or restaurant to monitor and actively manage online reviews.

Online reviews have the longest shelf life!

The Lifespan of online reviews and social media posts

For you, as a business, it is important to receive positive reviews, that’s clear. What is more important is that positive reviews are new. As already mentioned, new customer reviews have the highest relevance not only for the potential guests, but also for your ranking on Google and TripAdvisor. In one of our previous articles, we have written how to generate more good reviews using different tactics. Here we would like to show you how you can use social media to achieve this goal.

Get more reviews using Twitter and Facebook

Facebook

In case you haven’t done it yet, the first step is to activate Reviews on your Facebook page. This way your guests can leave their reviews directly on Facebook.

In the settings of your Facebook page you can add the Reviews-tab.

By activating this feature, you get a valuable feedback from your customers. Besides, you will be listed on Facebook Services – the search engine of Facebook for local businesses.

Twitter

How can you use Twitter to generate online customer feedback, with the short lifespan of Tweets? It’s easy! Ask your followers and post a link to your TripAdvisor listing, for example.

Those who find it too blunt, can, for example, find a (positive) review and post a nice Tweet with it (see example). It is a good opportunity to encourage other guests to share their experience and by doing so promote your property, as the kind words come from an actual guest and not from you.

We don’t explicitly say that you should stop to monitor and actively manage social media – on the contrary, continue to do so. However, don’t forget how big the influence of online reviews is and make sure to integrate them into your social media strategy. At the end of the day, your goal is to improve customer experience. And if you already have data from your guests, make use of them.

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About the Author

Alex takes care of our customers as their problem-solver and trouble-shooter. Of course writing compelling responses is a big part of his work as well and he strives for the best customer experience in every field he works. Therefore he tries always to discover new tactics how to improve our service and the one of our customers.