Fake Reviews: a Problem for Consumers and Businesses, and a Thriving Industry
TripAdvisor had 66 million reviews submitted in 2018 alone and a good chunk of them (about 5%) were fake according to the platform’s recent Review Transparency Report.
With online reviews influencing the decision of every user, the Topface Media team decided to sit down and take a more detailed look at fake reviews, how people perceive them and who is willing to write them.
Fake reviews as a powerful marketing tool
In fact, reviews themselves are a marketing tool. But they don’t have to be fake.
People will base their decision on purchasing depending on how good, bad or real the reviews for a product are. Simply said — they are a vital part of a buyer’s journey.
And the 88% of people who trust online reviews back up the claims.
This is exactly the reason why marketers are often pressured into buying fake reviews.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a small local coffee shop or if you’re a mid-size business — having a bunch of bad reviews show up when potential clients search for you is a sure way to push them away.
But why buy fake reviews? If people are leaving negative comments, it must mean the product or service is just bad.
Well, that’s not always the case. People and clients are way more likely to post a review when they have a negative experience with a brand. Also, it’s not uncommon for the competitors to play dirty and hire someone to leave fake reviews for your product.
That’s just how it is. Be long enough in business and in the online space, and you’ll experience it first-hand.
How does one get fake reviews? Isn’t it a kind of a black-hat marketing trick?
Yes, it is; but more people than you can imagine are willing to write fake reviews if they’ve been asked properly.
The easiest way seems to be hiring someone to write positive reviews. Websites like Fiverr have an abundance of copywriters who specialize in just that in addition to multiple offers on social media.
On Facebook, one can find groups where sellers offer a refund in exchange for a 5-star review.
Bloggers and influencers appear to be a better fit for an proper marketing strategy. Working with them and providing free products in exchange for an honest review is considered to be acceptable among both business owners and consumers. However, some brands make it clear that they expect a favourable review when sending free samples, plus it’s not uncommon for influencers to avoid marking their posts as sponsored or ads.
The more favorable way is to work with real customers and to gather positive reviews from them. You can use an online reputation agency to help with collecting feedback from your clients and creating a strategy for building an overall positive brand presence online.
What do people think about fake reviews in general?
While reviews can influence the decision of a buyer, do users make a difference between fake reviews and real ones?
We fine tuned our social listening tools and left them on for a month. More than 5,000 mentions came up over just 30 days, mostly containing recommendations on how to spot fake reviews. A good half of them were about discussing fake reviews on social media.
Twitter came in first, with 53% of all conversations on the topic. Youtube was second followed by Instagram and Facebook.
In terms platforms that social media users mentioned when talking about fake reviews, TripAdvisor came in first place, followed by Amazon and Facebook.
But one thing remained the same across all social media channels.
People can recognise fake reviews
Consumers are becoming more aware of how reviews and information about products online work. When it comes to star ratings, some users don’t even look at five-star reviews. Sometimes they’ll skip them altogether and jump straight to reviews that are between two and four stars.
When people buy from Amazon, they pretty much always go for the “verified purchase” whenever possible to skip the hassle of having to figure out if the review is genuine or not.
Of course, there is always the case where people would outright avoid online reviews. Instead, they do their own research or try to find information on YouTube from bloggers they trust.
Here’s a summary of what social media users pay attention to in order to identify fake reviews based on the most common tips we found:
- All reviews can’t be 5-star
- User accounts with a large number of 5-star reviews for similar products can’t be trusted
- On Amazon, look for “verified purchase” reviews only
- Reviews left pretty much on the same day make a company page look suspicious
- Reviews with 2–4 stars can be trusted more than 1- or 5-star reviews
- Don’t trust overly enthusiastic reviews, like those that say “best product I’ve ever had”.
- Copy the text of review in Google search to check if it’s original.
What does it look like from the other side?
We gathered nine answers from copywriters who get paid to bump up the online ratings of brands by writing fake reviews more or less on a regular basis. We tried to figure out how these writers think, so we asked six questions about the creation of realistic fake reviews.
From their feedback we learned that fake reviews span across most markets. Retail, services, construction, food, car parts and even theaters were all part of their answers. This means that most industries benefit from positive online reviews.
While all of these people get paid to write reviews, 3 of them still base their purchase on online reviews, most of them do it from time to time, and only 2 people don’t read reviews at all.
The hints that give away fake reviews are, in most part, similar to the ones that the social media users describe. Copywriters seemed to pay more attention to the language (“too emotional and overly enthusiastic”, “similar mistakes and style in all product reviews”, using industry-specific lexis,), and format (long texts, no mention of personal experience and lack of detail).
In general, they think they can recognize fake reviews when they see them.
To make their reviews seem authentic they analyze and imitate already published reviews, write in different styles that reflect various buyer personas, make grammatical and spelling mistakes and add some negative points.
The final question was about what they wouldn’t write fake reviews about. All of them were against writing about doctors, medicine or things that they consider potentially harmful to someone’s health, or illegal businesses.
Is there a silver lining?
We can see that consumers are aware of effective techniques for spotting fakes. They’ll read reviews, analyze them and pretty much sift through the fake ones real quick.
At the same time, fake reviews aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’re getting more sophisticated. Until the rating system is replaced with a better solution marketers will always find ways to use them in order to influence the decision of potential customers or to worsen the reputation of competitors.
