Customers Look to Local Businesses Reviews
A new study from a prominent marketing firm in the UK shows that customer reviews for businesses are more important than ever.
The BrightLocal study found that 92 percent of people read online reviews either regularly or occasionally. The study used a voluntary survey of customers.
The customers looked for reviews most often for restaurants, dentists, and doctors, but seeking out reviews was also more common this year than last year for car mechanics and dealers, realtors, taxis, and even accountants.
Data provided by BrightLocal.com.
According to survey results, it doesn’t take many reviews to sway most customers. One third of customers said they form an opinion by reading only 1-3 reviews, and a full 90 percent form opinions within 10 reviews. Professionalism and reliability were found to be the best incentives for customers to write positive reviews.
To read tips on getting more reviews for your business, check out this blog from the Online Image® archives.
Facebook Refers More Traffic than Google
Facebook is referring more web traffic to news sites than Google is, according to the results of a new study from the traffic analytics company Parse.ly. The study used data from comScore and Alexa to find that by just a hair, more visitors go to news sites from the social media site than they do from the search engine.
Graph provided by Parse.ly.
Experts speculate that this may be due to the way Facebook brings news directly to users via newsfeed rather than making them hunt for news. The study did not examine referral traffic for other kinds of sites.
But a report from January of 2015 found that the trend is on the rise across the Internet. Customers are moving away from search and toward social media, according to data aggregated from Google Analytics. The Shareaholic research showed that social networks sent 31.24 percent of referral traffic.