More recommendations mean more customers, right?
While that’s not always true, I’ve never heard of a case where more recommendations doesn’t lead to more customers. That’s especially true online. Recommendations go a lot further online than they ever could in real life.
It’s easy to see why, though. Recommendations online stick around for a lot longer, and they can also be seen by a lot more people. They’ll pretty much stick around as long as your business sticks around. That is, unless they’re on an obscure website that won’t be around for long.
Google, Yelp, and Nextdoor aren’t likely going anywhere soon so your recommendations and reviews will be around a long time. But you have to get those recommendations, and they have to be in the right place.
Become a Nextdoor marketing pro and get a free recommendation request email template.
Nextdoor is a great place to get more recommendations. Aside from public sites like Yelp and Google, Nextdoor is one of the best places for a local business to get more customers. That’s because people love sharing their favorite businesses.
It’s kind of like a cult sometimes. We love what we love, and we want others to love it too. That goes for local businesses too and sometimes even nationwide businesses.
Before we get into how you can get more Nextdoor recommendations, you need to understand how you’re going to benefit from them. It’s no use getting recommendations if you don’t understand the reason you want to get them.
The reason for getting more recommendations shouldn’t always be just to get more customers, either. You have to dig deeper into your purpose in order to get better results.
Why Nextdoor Recommendations Matter
Whatever your reason for getting more Nextdoor recommendations is, you will reap these additional benefits. More customers is a benefit, but it’s further down the line than these benefits. Each one of these benefits will contribute to the overall bigger picture of getting more customers.
Sometimes you have to think of the steps between your actions and the result of getting customers. The most generic answer to “what do you want to accomplish with this marketing campaign” is to get more customers. Unfortunately that answer won’t help you because it’s too broad and doesn’t take into account the many steps along the way to more customers.
Looking at these benefits that lead to more customers can help give you some different strategies for getting more Nextdoor recommendations. If you can look differently at the process of getting more recommendations, then you can come up with unique solutions to doing it.
None of the items in this article are exhaustive, they’re meant to help you think of different ways to approach the problem. Get to know these benefits and come up with some of your own. They will help you when we get to the step of actually getting more Nextdoor recommendations.
More Trustworthy
Recommendations on Nextdoor are a great way to build more trust with your neighbors. They’re a direct reflection of how trustworthy and loved your business is.
If your business has 50 recommendations while your competitor only has 20, you look more trustworthy. Since Nextdoor doesn’t have a rating system, it’s all about numbers. The more recommendations you have, the more trustworthy your business appears.
So, instead of just focusing on getting good reviews, you can focus your energy on quantity.
Always remember, on Nextdoor, more recommendations means more trust.
Local Most Recommended List
Nextdoor keeps a recommendation tally for the whole year for major categories. The Businesses tab on Nextdoor lets people search for local businesses and also see neighbor favorites for the year.
While the Businesses tab is somewhat hidden and most Nextdoor users aren’t likely to go there often, Nextdoor does promote the favorites list each year in several ways. If people are looking for recommendations, Nextdoor is happy to give them to neighbors.
Check out this list of neighborhood favorites. You can see that the businesses that get the most recommendations can make it into this list. That could provide quite the boost to business!
People will see only major categories in the favorites list. So, if your industry is a bit more obscure, it likely won’t do you any good. But that doesn’t mean there’s any less importance in getting as many recommendations as you possibly can.
Every neighborhood favorites for the year list is going to be unique too. Nextdoor likely chooses the most popular categories in your neighborhood and shows those. So, no two favorites lists will look the same both by category and business.
The top spot even looks different every time you view the page. The first time, for me, the top spot was a pizza place. The second time it was a coffee shop. For Lincoln, California you’ll see that the top categories are Food & Drink, Retail, Personal Care, Health, and Home Service Provider.
More Visibility
Recommendations provide your business with more visibility all throughout Nextdoor. One of the most prominent places you’ll see that recommendations provide your business more visibility is in posts.
One of the most important uses for Nextdoor is for neighbors to ask for recommendations. That and talking about that weird person they saw walking down their street.
When someone asks for a recommendation, we’ll say a vet, lots of neighbors want to chime in with their favorite vet.Take a look at this thread when someone asked for the best vet.
When a recommendation (or NOT recommending) is typed into a reply, Nextdoor automatically proposes the business name that matches the recommendation. If the person posting selects the proposed business, it attaches the businesses’ information to the recommendation.
If the business has recommendations, not only does the business information show up, an extremely visible red heart with a number by it shows up next to your business. That’s bound to catch a lot of attention unless the beginning of the post states “I DO NOT recommend…” In that case, no number of recommendations will do you any good.
So, not only are you provided a nice business profile in a post on Nextdoor, you get premium visibility by having your recommendations show up.
There’s more with visibility. Recommendations are an important factor in what order Nextdoor shows search results. People can search for business types in the search box of Nextdoor and for a business specifically on the Businesses tab.
So, someone could type in veterinarian in the main search and, after proximity, the most recommended will get priority. Not only that, in that same search the number of recommendations show up next to the business name. That makes a business with more recommendations stand out quite a bit more than a business with none.
According to Nextdoor, recommendations can show up in the following places:
- Business page
- Alongside business posts
- Alongside preview cards when neighbors mention your business
- Alongside local deals
- Alongside any neighborhood sponsorship posts and ads
As you can see, recommendations are pretty important for direct and indirect visibility within the Nextdoor app.
How To Get More Nextdoor Recommendations
Hopefully, with all the benefits of getting more Nextdoor recommendations, you also see some benefits for your business. It’s hard not to see the benefit if you’ve used Nextdoor ever.
Nextdoor is a local business recommendation powerhouse.
Only complaints outstrip questions for recommendations, so the benefit, even with all the complaints, looks pretty good. So, since you see the benefits (I hope!) then how do you get more recommendations on Nextdoor?
These are some pretty simple methods that will get you going with more recommendations than ever. Once you start racking them up, you’ll start ranking more in searches and coming up in more conversations. A win-win for you!
Use Business Posts
Nextdoor lets businesses post to Nextdoor and you should take full advantage of that opportunity. It’s free, and it’s a great opportunity to become known by your neighbors that you’re on Nextdoor and ready to serve the neighborhood.
According to Nextdoor, “business posts will show up in the newsfeed amongst neighbor posts and updates.”
That means you can introduce your business to neighbors and ask anybody who has previously done business with you to recommend your business. That can be a huge boost for businesses who have been in the neighborhood for a while but just haven’t established a big Nextdoor presence yet.
Just write a great introduction of your business, how long you’ve been in business, and be sure to include your unique recommendation link. Nextdoor has a template you can use for your company introduction on Nextdoor.
Share Your Page Outside Nextdoor
Nextdoor is great, but some people might not know about Nextdoor or they haven’t signed up yet. You can be the hero and point them towards complaining neighbors and irrelevant local news. Just kidding, Nextdoor has its share of junk like all other social media but overall it’s extremely useful.
You can link to your Nextdoor business page anywhere and people can visit your profile and recommend you if they sign up for Nextdoor. That means you can place a link on your website with your other social accounts, share it on social media, or even send it directly to customers.
Your Nextdoor page URL is something like this: https://nextdoor.com/pages/**business-name-location*/ which can be accessed publicly. Your recommend URL, on the other hand, can only be accessed by Nextdoor members or if someone signs up for Nextdoor is https://nextdoor.com/pages/**business-name-location/recommend/.
You can access your business page and its link by going to the Your reputation tab on your business page. Or you could use any of the other icons to share directly on social media or even email your Nextdoor business page to an acquaintance.
Respond When Tagged
If a customer is kindly enough to tag your business in their recommendation post on another neighbors post, you’re in! Nextdoor lets you respond as your business to the recommendation. That means you look super awesome by responding and at the same time get even more visibility.
So, never miss an opportunity to respond to a happy customer’s recommendation on Nextdoor. Without doing so, then the recommendation just sits out there looking lonely and odd. Your personal response will give it some extra oomph.
Ask Everyone
You can ask more than just your customers. Nextdoor allows you to ask for recommendations from family, friends, or any type of connections you have. If you volunteer somewhere, you can ask them to recommend you also.
Nextdoor doesn’t have a lot of rules for who and who you cannot ask for recommendations from. Take full advantage of that and ask anyone and everyone you can. People really trust Nextdoor for recommendations because it’s made up entirely of people who are their neighbors. It’s not as commercialized as other social media and people like and trust that.
Keep An Eye Out
If a customer recommends your business in a post, that’s great. They don’t always tag your business in their recommendation, though. That’s a missed opportunity for your business.
If a customer recommends you, that’s good for your name brand, but it doesn’t connect your recommendation to your actual business. When they actually tag your business in the post, then it links to your business page on Nextdoor and even counts as a recommendation on your business page!
So, a recommendation on a post in Nextdoor that’s linked to your business not only gives you some awesome street credit, it will forever be connected to your business page. That means potential customers will see the recommendation on your Nextdoor business page.
Automate Review Acquisition Campaigns
Gather customer information, sending a recommendation request, following up, following up again, and managing recommendations is a lot of work. Not only that but doing it manually guarantees you’re missing a lot of review opportunities and failing to see the bigger pictures.
That’s why the best way to get more recommendations on Nextdoor is to use a local marketing automation tool that helps you automated the review acquisition process. Loclmark, our local marketing automation software, makes it easy to ask for reviews by email and/or text, follow up, and gather valuable feedback easily.
It’s as simple as setting up a review generation campaign using Nextdoor and then feeding it customer data to continuously contact, followup, and collect analytics. It’s as easy as this…
Click the Add another review site link.
And then type in Nextdoor, then put in your recommendation URL from your Nextdoor business page. This specific campaign will also give your contacts the option to leave a review on Google Maps, also, but you can deselect it and just ask for recommendations on Nextdoor.
If you want to take it to the next level, also include Nextdoor in your text recommendation generation campaign. Once you enter the Nextdoor information for your email campaign, it will show up as an option in your SMS campaign.
Pretty easy and pretty cool, right?
Turn Recommendations Into Customers
I’m not sure if this section is absolutely necessary, but I’m covering it anyway. If you follow many of the items above then you’re going to naturally turn recommendations into customers. Some of them will have a better recommendation to customer ratio, though.
One of the most important activities you can do every time you can is to respond to neighbor posts when you’re tagged in a recommendation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a positive message or a negative message disguised as a recommendation (like the one earlier). Make sure you respond and have your company be seen positively.
If your company has a physical and active presence on Nextdoor then your recommendation will be more powerful. That means you’re more likely to turn recommendations into customers. It’s also going to help you constantly get new recommendations which are important.
Become a Nextdoor marketing pro and get a free recommendation request email template.
The raw number of recommendations your business has is important, but having constant new fresh recommendations is just as important. Reviews and recommendations become stale. That means neighbors either won’t trust as much or just won’t even read your recommendations if they’re not fresh.
If your business has 20 recommendations but that last one was 6 months ago, your business won’t look as trustworthy and those 20 reviews won’t hold as much weight.
So, make sure you’re constantly asking and gathering new recommendations. A good local marketing automation tool makes that process much more manageable. Be sure to check out how it can help you gather more recommendations, keep them fresh without much effort, and convert all those recommendations into more customers for your business.