Mentions of Your Business You Never See

The conversations you are not in

Most owners know where their reviews are. They check Google and Facebook, perhaps Yelp, and reply when something new appears.

Meanwhile the business is being discussed in places that send no notification: a neighbourhood group on Facebook, a thread on a local forum, the comments under a news story, someone else's review.

Those conversations are often more candid than reviews, and they are read by exactly the people deciding where to go.

Nobody can watch all of them, but an owner can see most of what matters in a few minutes a month.

Where the mentions are

• Neighbourhood groups on Facebook, many of them closed to non-members.
• Local forums and threads where someone asks who to use.
• News sites and local blogs, including the comments underneath.
• Reviews of other businesses that mention yours in passing.
• Photographs tagged with your location on Instagram.

The first is where much local conversation now happens, and it is the hardest to watch: closed groups do not appear in search results, and no alert will find them. Someone has to be a member and look.

Why they matter

A question in a neighbourhood group, such as whether a place is still open, gets answered by whoever happens to see it. If nobody knows, a guess becomes the answer.

Forum threads and articles also turn up when people search for your name, sometimes on the first page, beside your own site and listing.

And kind mentions are word of mouth you would otherwise never hear about. Knowing who speaks well of you, and where, is worth something.

Setting up free alerts

Google Alerts sends an email when new pages mentioning a phrase appear in Google's results. It is free and takes a few minutes.

Create one for the business name in quotation marks, one for each common misspelling, and one for the owner's name if customers know it.

Set it to send at most once a day, from automatic sources, with all results rather than only the best, which can filter out the small local pages you most want.

Expect some noise with a common name. Adding the town to the alert narrows it.

What alerts miss

Alerts see only what Google indexes, so they miss closed groups, most social media posts and much of what is said in comments.

For those, search directly once a month: the business name on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and in any local forum your customers use.

A Google search for the name in quotes, with your own site excluded by adding a minus sign and site: before your domain, shows what others have published about you.

A worked example

An izakaya on a busy restaurant street, open evenings only, watched its Google and Yelp reviews closely and replied to every one.

In March, scaffolding hid the building's front and sign for most of a month. A regular mentioned that people in a neighbourhood Facebook group were asking whether it had closed.

A proper search found more: a food forum thread complaining that the kitchen stopped taking orders well before closing, and a news site's list of late-night spots with an old phone number.

There was also a review of the karaoke bar next door, which mentioned the izakaya holding a table for a group while they waited for a room.

The owner joined the group and replied once in the thread, with the dates of the repairs and the hours. The news site corrected the number after a short email.

The forum complaint was fair: the kitchen did close early on quiet nights. The listing and website now show a last-order time, and alerts for the name and two misspellings arrive daily.

Checking the groups that matter

List the three to five places where your customers actually talk: neighbourhood groups, a local forum, a community page for your town, a hobby forum if your trade has one.

Join them as yourself, the owner, not as the business. A reply from a named person reads better than one from a logo, and it is harder to mistake for advertising.

Read each group's rules before posting anything; many ban promotion outright. Then search each one for your name once a month.

Deciding whether to reply

Reply when a fact is wrong: hours, prices, whether you are open, what you offer. A short correction stops a guess from spreading.

Reply when someone describes a problem you can fix, or asks a question nobody has answered.

Leave alone threads where a reply would restart an argument, old ones that have gone quiet, and jokes. A kind mention can often be left alone too, or thanked briefly where the group welcomes it.

How to reply when you do

Use your own name and say who you are. Keep it short, factual and friendly, and offer a way to continue privately if there is more to sort out.

Reply once. A second and third reply turns a correction into a dispute.

Never post as a pretend customer, and do not ask friends or staff to join in without saying who they are. It is deceptive, it is usually spotted, and it becomes the story.

Fix the cause as well

Many mentions point at something real: hours wrong on a listing, a phone number that changed, a kitchen that closes early.

Correct it where it starts, on the website, the listing and the sign, so the same question does not come back next month in another group.

The counter-case

A business customers rarely discuss in public, such as a supplier to other businesses, will find little to watch. One alert and a quarterly search are enough.

Some mentions are not worth finding, let alone answering; a grumble from two years ago has done what it will do. And none of this should take more than twenty minutes a month.

Set the alerts, check the few groups that matter, and reply only where it helps.

This month

1. Create an alert for the business name in quotes.
2. Add alerts for misspellings and the owner's name.
3. List the groups and forums your customers use.
4. Join them as yourself and read the rules.
5. Search each one for your name monthly.
6. Reply only to wrong facts, problems and open questions.
7. Fix the cause on your site and listings.

Step six keeps the rest manageable. Watching without a rule for replying turns into replying to everything, and an owner who answers every mention starts to look defensive.

Handling a customer who wants something in exchange for a review is covered in a customer offering to remove a review for a refund.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.