A New York hotel has enacted a policy that fines large parties for any negative reviews the business receives online. Online reviews have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly on sites like Yelp. And consumers tend to trust the reviews left by their fellow customers. So just how influential can these reviews be? And how prominent are negative reviews?
Negative Reviews
In Ask Your Target Market’s latest survey, 13% of respondents said that they have posted online reviews of businesses online many times. 21% said they’ve just posted one or two online reviews of businesses. And 67% said they never have.
Of those who have posted online reviews at least once, 54% said the tone of their review(s) was mainly positive. Just 16% said they have posted mostly negative reviews. And 31% said they have posted neutral reviews or a mix of positive and negative reviews.
Online Reviews
So how about the other side of online reviews? 27% of respondents said that they often read online reviews of businesses. 39% said they sometimes read reviews of businesses online. 21% said they rarely read these online reviews. And just 14% said they never read online reviews.
Buying Decisions
It’s clear that online reviews can reach a lot of people. But what kind of an impact can they have once they do? 23% of those who have read online reviews said that they can have a big impact on their buying decisions. 56% said that online reviews can somewhat impact their buying decisions. 19% said that online reviews don’t really impact their buying decisions. And just 3% said online reviews don’t impact their buying decisions at all.
You can view the complete survey results in the widget below and be sure to click “Open Full Report” to take advantage of all the chart and filter options.
Photo Credit: FILTERED-YELP-REVIEWS from Flickr
What do you want to know? If you need some consumer insights on a particular topic, let us know in the comments below and we’ll consider it for an upcoming survey post.
Results were collected on August 6 via AYTM’s online survey panel.
