Fake reviews are not new and despite the claims from companies like Amazon saying they’re fighting them, they’re losing, to say the least. We have more fake reviews online than ever before and more people who rely on them than ever before.
Researcher, Which? just wrapped up their latest review of online reviews on Amazon and the results were compelling. If you haven’t heard of a brand but it ranks really well it’s probably full of fake reviews. For perfect 5 star reviewed products, they found that 100% of the companies/products were unfamiliar to their experts and 87% of the reviews were unverified, meaning generally faked.
Here’s another thing, 97% of us use online reviews when buying something new. So, what should you do? Here are their tricks to cut through the fakes reviews.
- Look at a reviewer’s profile. If they do a bunch of reviews within the same day, it’s almost always a faker.
- Look for all 5 stars or all 1 stars within reviewers profiles, fakers almost always do all 1’s to hurt competitor’s or 5’s to prop up their products.
- One-word reviews. Real reviews are almost never one word. Fake reviews almost always are.
It’s a pain to have to fact-check the reviewers but it’s better than being duped.
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