How User Generated Content can Affect Your Business

Whether you actively encourage customer reviews on your own website or have customers commenting on your products or services on third part sites, user generated content has a number of pros and cons.

Keep reading to discover the good, the bad and the ugly of user generated content.

The good

Having customer reviews on your own website can be great for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes. This is due to having regular and unique content posted on your own website.

In an ideal world, all the reviews and comments left by your customers would be positive ones that painted a great picture of your company and enticed others to buy online or call to book your services.

Glowing testimonials can really help you generate more sales online. Just make sure you include as much information as possible to make sure people believe what they read.

The bad

A big disadvantage of asking your customers to send in their feedback for you to publish on your website is that not all of it will be positive.

This throws up a bit of a quandary – do you only publish the good customer reviews and delete the bad ones or do you take a more honest and ethical approach by publishing all user generated content?

Of course, even if you publish everything, you can still comment on what people have said to get your side of the story across. However, many of the people who visit your website may get doubts in their mind if they read any negative reviews.

The ugly

Third party sites such as Google Places and FreeIndex allow customers to submit their reviews of your business.

This is where things can turn ugly for your online reputation. When someone submits a terrible review of your products or services on one of these sites, you will have no control over what’s written.

Some third party review sites may be prone to unethical ‘user’ generated content from your competition looking to devalue your business so it can be difficult to establish what’s genuine and what’s not.

Every business is different so it’s wise to weigh up these pros and cons before going down the user generated content route.

If you liked this article you may want to read my beginner’s guide to online reputation management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 8:50 am and is filed under Online Reputation Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.