Spredfast adds reviews to the social channels in its dashboard

Spredfast has announced it is integrating online reviews into its platform for the first time.

The reviews come from a brand’s business listing or page on various sites offering this kind of feedback, and the social management platform is integrated with more than a hundred sites, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, Facebook and booking.com.

Consumer reviews, says Product Marketing Director Austin Lytle in a blog announcement, “fuel decisions to buy,” because they provide others’ direct experiences about “which product to add to the cart, what dish to order, or where to stay.” He added:

They are public descriptions of personal experiences with your brand, and not too different from the social posts you already manage today. Just like you wouldn’t ignore a passionate post on your Facebook page, we think it’s time to treat reviews like you do other social channels.

Because they are integrated alongside the management of the social channels, Spredfast users can now see the ratings and reviews across all locations, label and route reviews or comments for urgent attention, gauge sentiment tracking and track responses as if they were customer service operations. Here’s a screenshot within the reviews channel:

You can also respond to them directly, VP of Product Marketing Josh Rickel pointed out, either directly from within Spredfast or via a link to those review sites. He said that about half the 100+ review sources have direct response integrations, and approximately half have links.

The big question about reviews — as with social comments in general these days — is whether they are genuine. Fake reviews, such as from competitors, are not uncommon, but the reviews come into Spredfast without validation.

It’s possible the next big innovation among social management sites will be employing various services or technologies that gauge the authentication of social comments, whether brief posts or reviews, just as various forms of validation are now common among ad exchanges.

Spredfast isn’t the only social media management tool that employs reviews, but Rickel touted his company’s integration of reviews into its social care workflow, as another channel.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.