After reading the title, you might ask yourself why you would ever want to find the negative reviews of your competitors. Well, the answer is easier than you’d think: It is an easy and effective way to get new customers. You are jumping in at the point of a bad experience and when they need an alternative.
Before we get to the six ways to find the negative reviews of your competitors, let’s see how to use them to get new customers:
- You can learn from them and improve your own products and customer service. If you start monitoring your competitors' negative reviews, you can avoid having the same issues.
- You can connect to the author of the negative review outside of that channel. Try to find a way to engage with them directly.
- You can also comment directly under the negative review, but save this solution only in case of a scenario when your competitor doesn’t respond to the review.
- You can build a strong presence on social media where your competitors fail to do so.
Now that you know what to do when you find those negative reviews, here are six easy ways to find them:
Track your competitors on social media
You may find some online tools that would do half the trick, but following your competitors and checking their mentions and reviews personally can give you another perspective on your market. Monitor the visitors’ posts on Facebook, check their Instagram comments, watch the mentions on Twitter, and take notes.
Check your competitors' blog comments
You will seldom find a thoroughly managed corporate blog. If you run through all the blog posts and all the comments, you will find some unanswered comments or questions that could have led to negative reviews. But as we mentioned earlier, you shouldn’t respond to those comments directly under a post. Click on the authors’ names instead, and send them a direct message. Don't respond directly to negative comments left on your competitors' blogs! I'll cover some much more effective ways to utilize these comments at the end of this post.
Use alerts to monitor brand mentions
There are several online tools you can monitor brand mentions with. You can set up alerts for mentions of your competitors' brand names or even specific product names that will alert you about positive and negative mentions across the web. This includes blogs, articles, and other web pages.
Monitor local and global review sites
When customers are looking for reviews of a product, a service, or a business, they either use a search engine or go to a review site. And a business has to be aware of addressing the negative reviews left on these special sites, because if they aren’t, they miss an opportunity to work on their online reputation.
Use an online tool to keep an eye on these review sites with mentions of your competitors’ names.
Apply social listening tools
There are social listening tools that can help you keep up with the negative mentions of your competitors. Nowadays, since it is important for brands and businesses to respond to consumers properly through social media, competitors that don’t work on that aspect can easily fall behind. And there are, again, two ways you can benefit from that: You can be the brand that is there with a good reputation, or you can reach out to those left unanswered.
Monitor your competitors’ reviews
If they use online retail sites to sell their products, you can find a lot of reviews about their products. While you can’t respond to these reviews, you still can use these comments to improve your business and your service.
