Startups Stack Exchange Archive

How can I attract reviewers for a product review site?

I have a website that allows users to review and discover websites and online businesses. Think of it like Yelp for the Internet: if you’re looking for the best dating network or want to review an online shoe store, this is where you’d go.

I’ve got a decent database of websites so far (about 350 and growing), ranging from tiny startups to giants like Facebook and Netflix and Reddit. What I don’t have are reviews. I’ve gotten my friends to write as many as I can, and I’m writing reviews for every website I’ve ever used, but obviously a review site lives and dies by the number of reviews its community generates, and we’re not generating many.

I’d like to start partnering with websites, to have them encourage their users/customers to leave reviews on my site the way restaurants and such do on Yelp, but before I do that I need a database large enough to justify the website’s participation.

Most of my research has returned tips for getting more paying customers (most of which don’t apply because the website is free), getting reviews for a specific product (like if I wrote a book and want Amazon reviews), or getting users for a “review site” in the sense of me writing movie reviews on a blog, etc. I can’t find much information about attracting users who will leave reviews on a variety of products.

How might I go about building a community of reviewers? Are there communities I can tap into, or best practices I can implement, to draw people who will share their opinions? Are there any marketing tips specifically for building a review community? Obviously everyone has websites that they love and hate, I just need to figure out how to get them to sit down and share those thoughts.

The website is called FlitterWeb and is located at FlitterWeb.com

Answer 1447

Several ideas on how to make people write good and bad reviews.

Revenge reviews

The question is - what happens, when a person is willing to write a review for free?

One obvious case is when he or she is hugely dissatisfied with some service provider. In some countries, there are some oligopolies, which are notoriously bad at customer service and you can’t go from one provider to another because all of them suck.

If someone was offended by a company, and can’t easily go to another one, he or she is highly motivated to write a bad review.

Maybe you can apply this to your site. “Hot buttons” (events, which could trigger a person to write a bad review) may include:

  1. Site X drove me crazy because of bad usability.
  2. Site Y delivered the items I ordered with a great delay.
  3. When I contacted the call center of site Z, they were rude to me.

You can look at the product groups you have, and then, for every product group, think - what malfunction during the lifecycle of that product can upset the user so much that he or she will spend half an hour writing a bad review?

Karma

Let’s say that for every review, the reviewer gets some amount of Karma points. He or she can use these Karma points to do things, which users will less Karma cannot (like downvote reviews, or edit them, or close them - pretty much like StackOverflow).

Badges

Let’s say, I like to eat out. Whenever I go to a restaurant, I write a review on your web-site. Your web site may give me a badge like “Restaurant evaluator in area X” (again, similar to StackOverflow).

They have no real value to the customers, but may motivate them to participate.

Community feedback

Above I told my idea on attracting bad reviews. Now let’s look at how we can attract good ones. For this, you may run following experiment:

  1. Let’s say that web site X received lots of bad reviews.
  2. You find a community of users, who is interested in X.
  3. You write a message in that community (e. g. a forum) along the lines “Can it be true that web site X is really as bad as indicated by our reviews?”.
  4. Then measure the results (how many good reviews were generated for X after that post? was there an increase compared to the average number of reviews?)

Company rebuttal

When a company has received lots of bad reviews, you could offer them to place a text close to each negative review called “Response from the company”.

This provides value for both the company and the person, who left a bad review:

  1. The company can protect itself from false reviews (like trolls and competitors).
  2. The customer, who was treated badly sees that the company has been informed and - maybe - will do something about it.

Company urges users to write good reviews

Finally, if there are lots of bad reviews, the company may motivate their customers to leave good reviews (in some podcasts you can hear at the end “if you liked this podcast, please leave a rating on iTunes”).

Answer 1414

So far you’ve learned that, among all the reviewers who use the site, only you have become a committed repeat reviewer.

So what’s in it for you? Well, it’s your site. What’s in it for others? Seeing their name on the web. Which is magical. Well, it is if it’s 2004.

Right now you’re focused on solving your problem. Wrong focus. You need to know where budding site reviewers are hanging out, what bothers them, and whether you could make their lives better. For instance, by paying them. (Have you tried whether that works?)

And then, you may have to start again, because there’s no guarantee there’s any kind of straight line path from the site you’ve built to a site that could grow under its own attractive force.

Answer 1606

Define who are your users and customers.

Show users and customers the benefits they will gain from your company not the features.

You can just read one of the greatest books for entrepreneurs: Running Lean by Ash Maurya.

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