Thoughts & Ideas
Restaurant Review Monitoring and Reputation Management are Vital
Why Monitor Your Restaurant’s Reputation?
Restaurant growth is fueled by the satisfaction of its patrons. Did they like the food; the service; the atmosphere? Nothing will help a restaurant grow, like good reviews from happy diners. However, if a diner is dissatisfied, for any reason, they are even more likely to write a review and, left unanswered, just a few negative reviews can slow business to a crawl.
Reviews can tell you other things, like what dishes are especially popular. Are more people giving good reviews for breakfast, lunch or dinner? Is a particular employee giving outstanding service? A wealth of information regarding everything from menu selection and quality control to marketing is available by closely monitoring restaurant review, and rating websites.
Which Websites Are Most Important For Restaurant Review Monitoring?
This mobile app and website lets users share their locations with friends. When visiting a business, customers can “check in” through the app and leave photos and “tips” for other diners, including recommendations. Foursquare has over 35 million users worldwide. This is an important website for restaurant review monitoring.
Businesses listed on Google Places and the accompanying reviews show up toward the top of the page on Google and Google Maps searches. Restaurant reputation management needs to include Google Places.
Open Table is the world’s leading provider of online restaurant reservations. The website lets consumers who booked with them share their dining experiences. About 24 hours after dining at the restaurant, customers receive an e-mail inviting them to provide feedback. Each month, more than 12 million diners are seated through OpenTable.
Trip Advisor is the world’s largest travel site, featuring reviews and advice on hotels, resorts, restaurants, vacation packages and more. This site has more than 100 million reviews and opinions and 200 million unique monthly visitors.
Restaurant reviews are a bog part of what this website has to offer.
Zomato is a mobile app all about finding restaurants. The application has been downloaded 26 million times. Reputation management and restaurant review monitoring includes attention to this site.
Yelp has about 100 million monthly unique visitors and about 20 percent of the reviewed businesses on Yelp are restaurants. Yelp offers businesses instant email notification of reviews.
When to Respond to Patron Reviews
If a restaurant receives a negative review on any of these websites, someone in charge should respond to it within 48 hours.
How Does a Restaurant Owner Keep Track of Reviews?
Keeping on top of what patrons are saying about you online can be a challenge. How do you monitor all these review websites and protect your reputation? You want to put yourself in a position to control, as much as possible, how you are perceived in all these “sharing” sites.
Here are some ideas on how to stay on top of and control your reputation online:
- You can check these review sites yourself on a daily basis, but this can be time consuming and easy to forget.
- Setting up a Google Alerts can be beneficial, however these do not always catch online comments and reviews.
- Yelp and TripAdvisor offer businesses the free option of receiving e-mail notification every time a review is posted. You can sign up for this service and appoint someone on your existing staff to actively monitor these notifications.
The most reliable and complete way of knowing what people are saying about you on the review websites is to sign up for a service such as FreeReviewMonitoring.com. Here, you can sign up to receive notifications each time your restaurant is mentioned on one of the important review websites. By catching any negative reviews quickly, you can frequently change them into good reviews. You are showing that you care about your customers.