It is important that your business takes the right approach to responding to any online reviews received by customers. The following are some tips to follow when doing so.

Because social media has a place in almost any business these days, it is much easier for customers to share their opinions on, or reviews of, your product or service. Whether it is through a review site, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, or the BBB, or simply in the comments on Facebook or a Tweet, there are multiple ways for the public to share their thoughts—positive or negative.

SearchEngineLand’s findings for their annual Local Consumer Review Survey in 2014 revealed that 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. But luckily, in the digital sphere, businesses are able to keep up a discussion with customers on these sites. However, it is important to remember a few best practices when doing so.

1. Make responding to comments a priority, but take your time to give the best response.

• Stay alert as to when a review or comment is posted. Whether you have a social media person or digital marketing representative whose job it is to monitor reviews as they come in, or set a time to do it daily, give each review a well-thought-out response.
  

2. Make a plan.

• Come up with a system that allows you and your colleagues to categorize reviews; maybe just positive and negative, or maybe positive, negative, and serious. Then, decide how you will respond to those reviews. Come up with approved messages that should be shared in different situations, and flag reviews that need additional follow-up.
  

3. Respond to negative and positive comments.

• Of course we want to jump in and put a band-aid over someone’s negative review, but there is just as much merit in commenting on someone’s positive comments. While we might feel like a customer’s adverse reaction requires a more urgent response—and in some cases this might be true—thanking someone for a complimentary review can also build relationships.
  

4. Don’t get defensive.

• It can be hard to not take negative reviews personally—especially for a small business owner who has put their blood, sweat, and tears into building their company. However, a social media review is no place to pick a fight, or stand your ground. Remember that the review came from a person who has used your service or product and was dissatisfied. Use the opportunity to start a discussion on how you can improve. Even for the most biting reviews, a neutral response asking for a way that the customer can be contacted other than social media is your best bet to professionally handling the situation. When handled correctly, some customers even take back to social media to compliment the company on how they remedied a complaint.

Remember—it is to your business’ benefit that reviews receive a response. In fact, it’s been proven. Medallia released a study last March titled “Responding to Social Media Boosts a Company’s Bottom Line, New Research Finds” which examined data from hotels around the world—both business and customer data. The goal of the study was to “quantify the impact of social media engagement on a company’s revenue growth, customer satisfaction and social reputation.” According to the findings, there is a direct correlation with rate of response to reviews on social media to the number of rooms a hotel sells out. “Properties that responded to over 50 percent of social reviews grew occupancy rates by 6.4 percentage points, more than twice the rate of properties that largely ignored social media reviews,” the release went on to say.

Even though social media has caused a decline in face-to-face communication in all sectors, people still talk, and if you can appropriately handle social media reviews, you’ll be better off when the people behind the reviews do have the chance to give your company a word-of-mouth recommendation.