The Grade.us "Reviews" feature allows you to see review activity across all of your review site links. From here you can setup email alerts whenever new reviews are posted, filter which reviews will stream on your website and review funnel landing page, and share positive reviews to your social media profiles.
Prior Reading:
In this Article
Why doesn't the Review Stream show the full review text?
How do I add my Review Stream to my Facebook page?
Can I setup an automated workflow via RSS using my review stream?
All Reviews
Think of your All Reviews tab as your command center - here you can find the source, date, rating, review content, and customer name for every review that Grade.us has collected. You can use the information here to determine which reviews to share or respond to, and track any actions you have.
From here you can also choose to filter your reviews. You can show reviews by a specific review site, by a specific rating, or any combination of the two.
Caution:
Not at all third-party review sites support monitoring. This means that Grade.us is unable to pull the reviews from the site and display them in the All Reviews section of your account. These reviews can be added manually or uploaded in bulk by following the steps below.
Manually Add Reviews
There are two ways to manually add reviews to your review stream. You can add reviews one by one, or you can add them in bulk by uploading a CSV/XLSX file.
Caution:
You can only delete reviews you have added manually. Reviews pulled from third party sites cannot be deleted. Delete manually added reviews by clicking on the "x" button under the "Stream" column.
To add a single review manually, perform the following:
1. Click on "+ Add a Review Manually."
2. Fill in the requested information, and click "submit a review."
To add reviews in bulk manually, perform the following:
FYI:
Formatting guidelines for your CSV or XLSX spreadsheet are outlined in this article
1. Click on "Upload CSV XLSX."
2. Choose the appropriate rating scale of reviews you are manually adding.
3. Click on the "Upload CSV XLSX" button to upload and attach file.
- A sample spreadsheet file is available for download. Click on the "see sample" link.
4. Organize Columns
- Move the options from the "Columns from file" column to the "Expected for upload" column.
Respond to Reviews
Grade.us provides you the ability to respond to a customer's review through the reviews tab. You can respond to reviews by clicking on the "Respond" button in the "Status" column. Depending on the third-party review site, you will be taken to their main webpage or the review itself.
Caution:
Google and Facebook do not allow review responses directly from a business listing. In order to respond to Google and Facebook reviews, connect your Google and Facebook account in the Links (beta) tab
Share Reviews through Social Media
Grade.us provides you with the ability to Share your reviews to your social media channels as long as your Grade.us account is connected to your social media account. Connecting your social media accounts is covered here.
Before you share your reviews, you can also edit the snippet of the review you would like to share, or you can share the entire review. The bold content in the "Review" column is a snippet of the review that Grade.us has already created. To edit the snippet to your own specifications, please perform the following:
1. Click on the "more" hyperlink to see the full review from your customer.
2. Select the pencil icon next to the green check mark.
3. Edit the snippet of your review and select "Submit" to save.
4. Preview the customer review that will be shared by clicking on the "image" link.
After you have edited the content you would like to appear, you can then continue on to sharing the review on your website by performing the following:
1. Navigate to the "Status" column.
2. Click on the "Share" button.
3. Fill out the following:
- Include review image with post?: This will include the snippet of the review in the post for you. Check this to include the default image. Uncheck this if you would like to customize the image.
- There are a few placeholders you can use in your post if you choose to customize. Copy and paste the desired placeholders into your post:
- [[snippet]]: Includes the snippet of the review.
- [[content]]: Includes the full content of the review.
- [[attribution]]: Includes the name of the reviewer as displayed on the review site of origin.
- There are a few placeholders you can use in your post if you choose to customize. Copy and paste the desired placeholders into your post:
- Social Media Check Boxes: Select the social media account(s) you would like to share your review with by selecting the check boxes next to the appropriate account. These accounts need to be set up under the "Settings" tab before they will appear as options here.
- Share Immediately: will share the review as soon as you select the "schedule" button.
- If you want to share in the future select the following:
- Date: Select the date you would like review to be posted
- Time: Select the time you would like the review to be posted
- Time zone: Select the time zone
- If you want to share in the future select the following:
4. Select "Schedule."
Status
Grade.us provides a "Set Status" link to keep track of any action taken on a customer review. Use it in a manner that suits your specific business needs - for example, track which customers require your attention and response, and take note of which customer reviews you've shared on your social media account.
Setting the status to "Attention", "Responded", or "Resolved" changes the "Set Status" text.
Stream
This option will allow you to toggle which reviews are shown in your review stream by clicking on the green check mark.
Tags
Utilize the tag function to facilitate a response workflow. You can use tags to identify specific staff to follow up on request, indicate the standing of a customer, or any other attribute that would be useful in organizing your feedback.
To add a tag, click the pencil icon. Type in your tag and press submit to save.
Customer Feedback
When a customer indicates they are unhappy, they are directed to your customer feedback form to address their concerns privately. If you are using our default contact form, those submissions are logged into the Customer Feedback tab. The submissions are categorized with the newest submission first.
Utilize the "Status" and "Tags" actions to flag private messages to follow-up.
You can also click on the "Export to CSV" button to download customer feedback into a spreadsheet.
Review Stream
The Review Stream is a custom code that can be used to show your reviews on your website. It will allow you to take the reviews from all the websites where reviews are being left (and collected by Grade.us) and display them in a format determined by you.
You can use the Customize Embed Code menu to edit your review stream.
Below is an explanation of the different options available in this menu:
- Show reviews?: Toggle on to display review content. Toggle off to remove them. This is toggled on by default.
- Include empty?: Toggle on to display reviews with no content.
- Show aggregate?: Toggle on to display the business' aggregate rating. If Show reviews is also toggled on, the aggregate rating will appear above the reviews.
- Use reviewer's last initial?: Toggle on to use only the last initial of your reviewers name.
- # of reviews: Change the number of reviews displayed in your stream at once.
- Exclude / Include only reviews from: Use this setting to restrict the content of your review stream to specific review sites (by default, the stream will pull from all listings you have loaded in for a listing).
- Display as carousel: this option will display only one review at a time, rotating between the # of reviews every few seconds.
- Shuffle reviews: this option will display a random set of reviews instead of the most recent.
After you're made your changes, click Update Embed Code to apply them. Copy your new embed code from underneath the menu and paste into the appropriate place on your website.
Settings
From the Settings tab you can change your Review Alerts, Review Stream, and Social Media settings.
Review Alerts
Review Alerts are emails sent whenever someone leaves a review on any of the sites you are monitoring. The Review Alerts function allows you to CC multiple recipients, and set the rating threshold for an alert. For example, Review Alert settings can be adjusted to only send out emails when customers leave a rating of 3 stars or less.
Caution:
Review alerts are sent out the morning after the review is published.
Stream Defaults
Stream Defaults allows you to adjust the filter settings that populate by default in your Review Stream.
The following content can be modified:
- Auto-publish reviews if rating is...: Allows you to select the threshold of the reviews that you would like to auto publish to your review stream
- Include empty: Toggle this to include ratings with no content.
- ...reviews from...": Allows you to Exclude/Include reviews from specific third party review sites.
- "+Add Site": Allows you to add additional review sites.
Social Media Accounts
Here you can link your social media account(s) to your Grade.us account and share reviews you have received on Twitter and Facebook.
To add a social media account perform the following:
1. Select "+Add Facebook Account" or "+Add Twitter Account" link.
- A pop-up window will appear. Follow the steps to link your account.
Caution:
In order to successfully connect to your Facebook listing, you must be an Admin on the Facebook business page you are trying to connect to your Grade.us account.
2. After setup is complete, follow these steps to share individual customer reviews from our dashboard.
You can also enable new reviews to auto-share on your social media accounts through the Review Stream Auto-Sharing section. You can adjust the timing, time-window, and amount of new reviews that are auto-shared on your accounts.
Caution:
By choosing to auto-share new reviews on your social media accounts, new reviews will be shared on all social media accounts you have added.
End of Article:
Congratulations! You are on your way to monitoring reviews and sharing customized review content with prospective clients. The next article will cover "Reporting," a feature that enables you to get a quick snapshot of the current state of your online reputation, track your campaign progress, and demonstrate ROI to your existing clients.
Common Questions
How do I add my Review Stream to my Facebook page?
To get your Review Stream on Facebook, you will first need to add a new dedicated tab to your Facebook business page using any third-party app that lets you add tabs that contain HTML. Here are some apps that our customers use:
Then, the process is just like adding the Review Stream to a website: copy/paste the embed code to the HTML content area of your new tab.
Why are my old reviews showing up as new?
There are several reasons why an old review may show up as new in our alerts. With Yelp, this happens frequently. Why?
Yelp aggressively filters (i.e. hides) reviews from new and inactive users but will ultimately “trust” those reviews should the reviewer ever become active. Therefore, it’s not uncommon for a review that has been caught in Yelp's filter for years to suddenly be published when the reviewer starts “Yelping” again years later.
A review written in 2011 could show up in your review stream tomorrow. Other review sites have their own algorithms for filtering and publishing reviews that may also lead to this behavior, but it is most common with Yelp.
Can I setup an automated workflow via RSS using my review stream?
Automated workflow, while possible, is not native to Grade.us. You can take the RSS feed URL (your landing page url with "/feed" at the end) and use it with automation sites like IFTTT or Zapier, but since this function is not native to Grade.us, we are unable to provide support or instructions for setting this up through any third party sites.
Why doesn't the Review Stream show the full review text?
Most often, third-party review sites retain the rights to content published about your business on their site. In other words, it’s against their terms of service to re-publish the reviews published on their site for any other purpose.
That’s why we only use a short snippet of third-party reviews in our review stream – to remain compliant with their terms of service (ToS).
Note that you can edit the snippet text to convey key info or details. Note also that because any reviews collected directly via your landing page belong to you, we allow you to show the the full text of reviews collected in this way.
Why doesn't the Review Monitoring pull in my Facebook reviews?
Facebook reviews not showing up? Be sure that you don't have any privacy restrictions on your Facebook page, such as country or age restrictions. Our system can't monitor the page if it can't see it!
An easy way to test and see if privacy restrictions are the root of your issue is to open the Facebook page in question inside an incognito window of your browser (why? Because you won't be logged into Facebook.)
If you are unable to view the page, privacy settings are the most likely culprit. Please click here for Facebook's support article for adjusting your page's privacy settings.
How can I setup Facebook or Google links to respond to reviews directly from the Reviews Tab?
To connect your Facebook or Google account to your Grade.us account, please see the Links (Beta) article.
My reviews aren't being pulled in. Does my link require a separate URL for Review Monitoring?
Review Monitoring requires the URL of the page where your reviews reside. For most review sites, this is the same as your main listing URL, but for some it is different.
Why would you need to set an alternative URL? Typically, it will be because you're using a special call-to-action link. For example, some users link directly to the "Write your Review" page of their chosen review site, to save the reviewer a few clicks. That's a fine practice, but it interferes with our ability to monitor reviews using that URL (because that "write your review" page doesn't contain any actual review content).
In this case, simply add the main listing URL as the optional Review Monitoring URL, and monitoring will work normally. We'll be able to monitor almost all of our integrated and monitored sites from your main listing page.
To add a separate monitoring URL, navigate to Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Your Review Site Links. Click the Pencil () on the site link you'd like to modify.
Paste the monitoring URL in the box labeled Review Monitoring URL.
Press Submit to save your changes. Monitoring will run and pull in any existing reviews within a few minutes.
How do I delete a review (collected directly or manually)?
You can permanently delete any reviews added via the dashboard - that is, a review that's not coming in from a third-party site or left directly via the landing page by a customer.
Reviews added via the dashboard by the owner of the account are considered "owned" by you--you added them, so you can delete them. But when you delete a review, you cannot recover it.
Otherwise, you can always choose to hide any review you don't want to "amplify" via the Review Stream or social sharing.
To delete a review, navigate to Dashboard > Reviews > All Reviews. In the Publish column of the review's entry, click the button.
Confirm your decision and the review will be deleted.
Does Grade.us support Joomla or Drupal?
Grade.us does not support integration with Joomla or Drupal at this time.
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