62% of Consumers Prefer Reviews from People They Know

Recent poll shows consumers prefer a single review from someone they know personally over large numbers of reviews from strangers.

In a February 2017 poll* conducted by Zappenin, the majority of consumers (62%) stated that when seeking a new product or service provider they value a single review from someone they know personally over lots of reviews from people they don’t know.

Here was the poll question:

When choosing a business (e.g., a restaurant, plumber, hair stylist), what type of review do you value most?

A.) A single review from someone I know personally
B.) Lots of reviews from people I don’t know

The results were clear.  The majority of consumers prefer even a single recommendation from someone they know personally over sifting through many reviews from strangers.  In other words, social proof (or “social validation“) from peers, friends and relatives carries a lot of weight in choosing a business and making a buying decision.

Survey Results

Clearly consumers value sites like Yelp & TripAdvisor… and even Google & Facebook… all known for amassing lots of reviews for millions of businesses & destinations.  However, the reality is that many consumers would prefer just one “word-of-mouth” review from someone they know.

The challenge is that word-of-mouth reviews are notoriously difficult to collect and make available exactly when consumers need them.  Consumers must cobble together these highly-valued recommendations from friends & relatives on their own.  Facebook and Google groups have made it easier in some situations, but it still far from mainstream behavior.

Zappenin plans to change this.

 

* Survey was conducted on both Facebook & Pollshare.  659 total respondents.

 

Facebook & Twitter in the Home Services Category

One of the cool things about being a socially-focused yellow page site is that we get to analyze the social data of the businesses on Zappenin.

In this quick analysis, we looked at the usage of Facebook pages & Twitter accounts across several popular Home Services categories.  Namely, we looked at 13,385 businesses across the U.S. in these seven Home Services categories:

The results are interesting:

facebook-and-twitter-in-home-services

Surprisingly, within each category, the percentage of businesses with a Facebook page was almost exactly the same as those with a Twitter account.  However two categories, Furnace Repair & Plumbing, had a far larger % of socially-active businesses than the remaining five.  The lowest socially active category was Electricians.

Below you can see the percentage adoption across all 7 social networks we currently monitor on Zappenin.

home-services-social-network-adoption-table

 

After Facebook & Twitter, Pinterest was the next most heavily used network followed closely by Google+.