Your online social reputation is quickly becoming the life blood of a strong marketing plan. Consumers are dumping their heavy telephone yellow Pages directories and turning to the Internet – 21 million visited Yelp.com in May 2009 alone! Every auto repair shop should be working hard at building social proof of their competence and trustworthiness.

Touch Points

Many shops follow up each customer visit with a phone call or email to verify customer satisfaction. To easily build your social reputation you can include an invitation to post comments to your business review website. Make it easy by including links to social media websites in your email signature. Also inform your customers about links on your auto repair website (you do have one don't you??) where they can post comments.

Which One?

You should have a few favorite review sites and spread your invitations amongst them. You can't go wrong with Yelp, Insider Pages, Google & Yahoo Local. Also look for local forums or websites that allow users to comment providing free auto repair advertising.

Here are some links where you can create business review web pages:

http://www.google.com/local/add/lookup

http://www.insiderpages.com/advertiser

http://www.yelp.com/business

http://www.yelp.ca/business

http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

http://www.edmunds.com/popupinfo/localserviceslistings.html

http://www.shopincanada.com/signup/

http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/help/help-popular.html

Cheers,
Doug

About the author:

Doug Fentiman is an authority on auto repair shop website marketing and founder of Robert Maxim International. Robert Maxim provides an inexpensive, easy to use website based marketing system that is designed from the ground up for automotive service and repair shops. We help shop owners build profitable businesses from lasting relationships with quality customers.