Trendswatch: Don’t trip up
TripAdvisor is a vital marketing tool for museums, even if the occasional bad review can sting, finds Geraldine Kendall
The web is now so vast that you can be certain that many visitors will be accessing information about your museum from platforms that aren’t yours.
One of the most prominent of these is the worldwide travel review site TripAdvisor. For many people, particularly those from overseas, it might be their first glimpse into what your area has to offer.
Instead of being a passive presence on the site, an increasing number of museums are waking up to the value of TripAdvisor and becoming more proactive about enhancing their ratings and profile on it.
The benefits speak for themselves: it’s free advertising to a wider audience than you could ever reach on your own (the site gets 315 million unique visitors a month globally) and a great way of letting new visitors know what your museum is all about.
Feedback can be useful for marketing, evaluation and advocacy materials, and even bad reviews, though they can sting, give a valuable insight into what your visitors are looking for and how you can improve.
So how can you go about enhancing your museum’s performance on TripAdvisor? The most important thing, of course, is to ensure your offline service is excellent and provides a great visitor experience, but it’s not as simple as that.
Gaining control of your TripAdvisor profile is a vital step – even if you’ve never used the site, it’s likely that someone has already added a profile of your museum. If that is the case, you can go to the site’s “TripAdvisor for business” page and register to verify that the venue is yours.
This will give you the power to monitor reviews, give an accurate description of your services and enhance your profile with high-quality images.
After that, it’s all about improving your score. TripAdvisor publicises your performance through ratings (the average number of stars your museum has received) and rankings (where it comes on lists of similar attractions, both locally and nationally).
The site is secretive about the algorithm it uses to work scores out, but they are known to be based on three elements of a visitor review:
It is crucial to maintain a steady flow of positive, up-to-date reviews. Assuming your visitors are coming away happy, encourage them to share this; it can be as simple as putting up a sticker (which TripAdvisor can provide) at the front desk, adding a TripAdvisor button to your website or handing a card out at the end of a tour urging people to rate you on the site.
Bear in mind that in TripAdvisor’s calculation, an attraction’s average review score carries more weight than its overall number of reviews, so even if your museum, gallery or heritage site gets a smaller footfall it can still rank well next to larger attractions.
The one thing every venue dreads about TripAdvisor is logging on to see a terrible review. People will often be more brutal on a third-party site, so negative comments are bound to crop up at some point.
When they do, the most important thing to do is to respond promptly (84% of the site’s users say this improves their impression after reading a bad review), and to do so in the right way. Polite professionalism is key, no matter how insulting someone has been.
Sometimes reviewers may have a point about crowding, inaccurate information or the state of the toilets – in which case it is vital to be honest and apologetic.
At other times they may have misunderstood an element of the museum (one historic site was recently slated for its sparse displays, when this was meant to reflect the poverty of the era it was depicting), or disagree with some aspect of your policy, such as displaying human remains. In cases like this, avoid a condescending tone.
When used in the right way, TripAdvisor can be an excellent marketing tool, so why not take control of it before your visitors do?
Having a well-maintained TripAdvisor profile with up-to-date images and descriptions is crucial, especially for tourists. People are brutally honest on the site – you see things that you would never get in your own visitor comment forms – but it’s really good at telling you what visitors need.
Anyone who leaves a comment wants you to engage. Sometimes you might drop the ball for whatever reason; the key is being honest in responding.
We also check key words in reviews, such as the terminology used to describe collections, so we can use them in our own copy. It takes us less than an hour a month and it’s easy to do – if you don’t maintain it, other people will just write about you anyway.
Zak Mensah is the head of transformation at Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives
One of the most prominent of these is the worldwide travel review site TripAdvisor. For many people, particularly those from overseas, it might be their first glimpse into what your area has to offer.
Instead of being a passive presence on the site, an increasing number of museums are waking up to the value of TripAdvisor and becoming more proactive about enhancing their ratings and profile on it.
The benefits speak for themselves: it’s free advertising to a wider audience than you could ever reach on your own (the site gets 315 million unique visitors a month globally) and a great way of letting new visitors know what your museum is all about.
Feedback can be useful for marketing, evaluation and advocacy materials, and even bad reviews, though they can sting, give a valuable insight into what your visitors are looking for and how you can improve.
So how can you go about enhancing your museum’s performance on TripAdvisor? The most important thing, of course, is to ensure your offline service is excellent and provides a great visitor experience, but it’s not as simple as that.
Gaining control of your TripAdvisor profile is a vital step – even if you’ve never used the site, it’s likely that someone has already added a profile of your museum. If that is the case, you can go to the site’s “TripAdvisor for business” page and register to verify that the venue is yours.
This will give you the power to monitor reviews, give an accurate description of your services and enhance your profile with high-quality images.
After that, it’s all about improving your score. TripAdvisor publicises your performance through ratings (the average number of stars your museum has received) and rankings (where it comes on lists of similar attractions, both locally and nationally).
The site is secretive about the algorithm it uses to work scores out, but they are known to be based on three elements of a visitor review:
- Quality.
- Quantity.
- Recency.
It is crucial to maintain a steady flow of positive, up-to-date reviews. Assuming your visitors are coming away happy, encourage them to share this; it can be as simple as putting up a sticker (which TripAdvisor can provide) at the front desk, adding a TripAdvisor button to your website or handing a card out at the end of a tour urging people to rate you on the site.
Bear in mind that in TripAdvisor’s calculation, an attraction’s average review score carries more weight than its overall number of reviews, so even if your museum, gallery or heritage site gets a smaller footfall it can still rank well next to larger attractions.
The one thing every venue dreads about TripAdvisor is logging on to see a terrible review. People will often be more brutal on a third-party site, so negative comments are bound to crop up at some point.
When they do, the most important thing to do is to respond promptly (84% of the site’s users say this improves their impression after reading a bad review), and to do so in the right way. Polite professionalism is key, no matter how insulting someone has been.
Sometimes reviewers may have a point about crowding, inaccurate information or the state of the toilets – in which case it is vital to be honest and apologetic.
At other times they may have misunderstood an element of the museum (one historic site was recently slated for its sparse displays, when this was meant to reflect the poverty of the era it was depicting), or disagree with some aspect of your policy, such as displaying human remains. In cases like this, avoid a condescending tone.
When used in the right way, TripAdvisor can be an excellent marketing tool, so why not take control of it before your visitors do?
Good or bad, just engage
Having a well-maintained TripAdvisor profile with up-to-date images and descriptions is crucial, especially for tourists. People are brutally honest on the site – you see things that you would never get in your own visitor comment forms – but it’s really good at telling you what visitors need.
Anyone who leaves a comment wants you to engage. Sometimes you might drop the ball for whatever reason; the key is being honest in responding.
We also check key words in reviews, such as the terminology used to describe collections, so we can use them in our own copy. It takes us less than an hour a month and it’s easy to do – if you don’t maintain it, other people will just write about you anyway.
Zak Mensah is the head of transformation at Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives