As you probably know, LouderVoice was the first company to identify Twitter as an important source of reviews. We launched LouderTweets structured reviews all the way back in June 2007. We are also the people behind the @review user.
Whilst many people have used the structured reviews since then, many others have found the structure difficult to remember or just plain awkward.
We turned on free-form reviews on SMS last year and most people are much happier with that. They simply send an SMS to us beginning with "RE" (or one of our partners' keywords) and the remainder of the review is in whatever style they like.
We are now enabling the same feature on Twitter and want to get some guidance from our users. Below is a PollDaddy poll asking which method you would like us to use. If you don't like any of them, enter your suggestion in "Other".
[polldaddy poll="1306602"]
Tags: hreview, mini-reviews, review, reviews, twitter
Hey Conor, was tweeting you there when I realised a longer form would be easier!
I think the @ is best because it sticks to normal Twitter conventions, however I also think that having two different but similar @reply functions would be confusing.
I wonder could you simply use @review but keep the structured ones for now and simply detect them through their structure and process accordingly?
I never got into using # tags in Twitter, and for anyone who comes to Twitter new, they have to get to know the @reply quite quickly to use it effectively, so there'd be no learning involved to send a review then.
Those who are used to sending structured reviews could still continue to do so if they wished for any reason...
Cheers!
Frank
The hashtag #review is the best option. The @reviews user could then automatically aggregate them and allow people to follow it.
We may of course allow all of the above
but our concern is that it would just confuse people. e.g. we have people who use our plugin on WordPress and also use the tags method on the same reviews. Too many options is sometimes a bad thing.
I can't remember more than two letters at a time so re is better (and faster) for me but then that is just me.
The only tiny flaw in using RE is that we have seen LouderVoice users start tweets with it which weren't reviews.
I want two votes! @review, review, or #review.
@review is probably the most intuitive, but if I was to review, it would probably be mostly for the benefit of my twitter followers, and not all of them will see replies to other people.
I've never used the Loudervoice structure, as I'm uncomfortable with star ratings, which I understood to be a part of it.
I like this more open option. But just to sound a note of caution. Re is a recognised abbreviation to explain the context of a statement. Trying to co-opt for one use only will probably not succeed.
I went with the Hashtag option. While it is longer (maybe #rev is an option?), it does allow for natural language, allows your review to be visible to all (not just those following you and *all* your replies), and is in a format (hashtags) recognisable by more regular Twitter users.
Another idea is to allow "x/y" or "x out of y" as scoring options. LV will hope that they'll be "/5" or "out of 5" to blend in nicely, but "7 out of 10" should probably be recognised and converted automatically.
My €0.02.
All good stuff Cathal, thanks.
@mollydot - we'll try to be as flexible as possible
@simon - We still have star ratings but the reviewer can just use "superb" and we'll manually make that a 5 etc. Whilst most people only pay attention to 1 scores or 5 scores and are more interested in the opinion, star ratings are still useful as a simple ordering system for results etc. I wouldn't even bother read people's opinion of a hotel on roomex.com that averaged 2 stars or less in the reviews.
We actually used Re because it can mean "concerning". We thought it was a slightly amusing way of saying something like "Concerning Juno the movie, I found it fantastic". Not perfect grammar but the meaning is pretty clear.