It’s cloudy at best.
Brightlocal recently put out a study trumpeting that “88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations”.
However, when you look at the actual poll, it’s not as clean cut. It’s not like 88% said, yes I trust online reviews.
In the BrightLocal poll, 32% said they trusted online review if there were multiple positive reviews for the same business. So what happens if a business has only 1 or 2 positive reviews?
Then 30% said they trusted online reviews if they “believed the reviews were authentic”. Ok, soooo, that’s pretty subjective. Unfortunately, there’s no follow up question to these same people asking by percentage, how many online reviews in general are authentic.
Then 26% of people say they believe online reviews for some businesses, but no for others. Lol, that’s hardly a vote of confidence for online reviews.
Then 13% said outright, they do not believe online reviews.
So obviously, there’s lots of fine print caveats to this poll.
My take is that online reviews are not here for the long haul. In a few years, word will get around more and more to the mainstream how many positive reviews and negative reviews are fake and how easy it is to game the system.
I’m under the belief that online reviews will be replaced by “local gurus”. In other words, bloggers that write about various local businesses. They’re already starting to pop up. And I’ve seen studies showing consumers trust individual local experts more than review sites. I think this is the direction we’re heading in.