Unless you are from the dark ages, you might have not heard about TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is a go-to site to learn more about places.
What's not to love about TripAdvisor?
People can search for reviews and opinions about rentals, restaurants, attractions and hotels. These are real reviews from real people with real experiences of places and their opinions put value on how businesses and how people connect with them. Simply put, reviews help TripAdvisor users on their booking/buying decisions.
TripAdvisor has 96 million members with 500 million (and counting!) reviews from people all over the world. The site recently earned 390 million monthly visitors and those are expected to grow.
What do the numbers say to businesses like yours?
These numbers simply mean conversion. With TripAdvisor, there’s the opportunity to reach more people who are looking for your business. The good news is that getting your business to TripAdvisor is FREE.
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STEP I: Understand How TripAdvisor Works for Business
TripAdvisor is a place in the Web for holiday goers, regular backpackers, travel deal hunters, once-in-a-lifetime vacationers and everyone who simply wants to know anything about rentals, restaurants, attractions and hotels.
TripAdvisor users can:
See reviews of specific businesses
Get information such as business hours operation, phone numbers, websites and physical addresses
Read guides, travel tips, maps and routes
And so much more
As the biggest travel website, most information needed by a traveler to make their travel easier can be found on TripAdvisor. There are also forums where users can interact with one another.
TripAdvisor advertises and shows potential customers how great their business is. TripAdvisor will give you ideas on how to improve your business base on the perspective of your customers reviews and opinions.
Here’s how TripAdvisor works on both sides (customers and industry):
STEP II: Create/Claim a TripAdvisor Business Page
Claim or create your listing.
To find if somebody else has created a TripAdvisor listing for your business, you can check it here: https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/Owners Simply input your business name and location. If your business pops up on the results page, just follow the claim prompt and it will guide you through the process of claiming your listing.
To create a new TripAdvisor page, simple go here: https://www.tripadvisor.com/GetListedNew
STEP III: Manage and Optimise Your Listing
Once you’ve created or claimed your TripAdvisor page, you need to update your business information and then add photos of your business. These imageries captivate visitors. Make sure you use the most beautiful ones. While TripAdvisor does not have specific image size requirements, using high quality images of at least 1024 pixels wide x 350 pixels tall. You can also add videos!
Add special offers if possible. Highlight amenities to attract more attention.
For easy accessibility to monitoring your TripAdvisor listing, we recommend that you download the TripAdvisor app. You can also integrate Facebook and TripAdvisor.
One crucial point to remember when managing a TripAdvisor business listing:
Your list needs to be highly visible to your targeted audience for it to convert online viewers into booking customers. For higher visibility, you will need to keep in mind the basic algorithm of how TripAdvisor ranks business pages.
This is where user reviews play a huge part. User reviews are where most of the ranking algorithm relies. Your page will have higher visibility when reviews are:
Made of quality opinions instead of just plain stars
In higher volume; and
Recent
STEP VI: Collect More Reviews from Clients and Customers
To recap, you need quality reviews. Lots of it if you want to have higher visibility among your targeted audience.
It’s not just about algorithms and rankings.
Reviews by user-driven communities are built entirely on expectations. That means what people have heard or read on your TripAdvisor page is what they would expect for your business to be. TripAdvisor reviews have the biggest impact on creating expectations for your future clients/customers.
It’s important to manage and respond to existing reviews. Answer them whether they’re negative or positive. Also note that you cannot remove reviews as this is simply a part of TripAdvisor's transparency between industries and consumers. It is therefore imperative to keep your responses positive and find a resolution to negative reviews.
How it happens:
- A client/customer receives a text requesting to review your business on TripAdvisor
- They can choose to acceptor decline the question. If they opt to decline the request, they will be asked to leave a comment instead which isn't publicly posted anywhere on the Internet.
- The customer is then directed to a one touch log-in page to their TripAdvisor account, where they can leave a review for your business.
- After that you'll instantly receive a notification that a review has been posted.
Data of reviews in certain time-frames are collected in metrics and analytics format inside the Podium platform.
Podium also lets you do a review collection for your other listings like Facebook, Yelp and Google My Business page. Podium features its one-tap power for all these sites. Data and information are centralised under one simplified dashboard so you don’t have to manage each listing site. Everything is simplified.
STEP V: Keep Monitoring, Keep Improving
Overtime, monitoring and keeping track of your TripAdvisor page can be a hefty job. This is especially true when your listing begins to convert more people to book on your business. You need to focus on your business. You shouldn’t neglect the power of TripAdvisor as your business grows.
From the beginning of your TripAdvisor efforts, you should make use of Podium. Podium simplifies and centralises review acquisition and management through a single powerful dashboard that you can access on your desktop or on-the-go through your phone.
You can sort, filter and respond to every review you collected from TripAdvisor. With the help of Podium, it’s easier to:
drive more direct booking referrals
increase your online presence
Transform data into action
Reap the full benefits of Podium with the Podium mobile app. Podium Messenger lets you interact with customers which will come in handy if you run a busy business.
So, to recap...