TripAdvisor is growing in popularity and in reviews. For businesses in the travel or restaurant industry, it can’t be ignored.

Tracking reviews is an elusive sport. Really, when it comes to social media, everything is a review, a vote of support. But there are those kinds of reviews, and then there are the Reviews, the ones where your business is getting judged on a scale.

TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google+ Pages/Places, Yahoo Places, Foursquare, Urbanspoon — these are just a few of the most popular services customers use to make a review. TripAdvisor alone had managed to accumulate more than 45 million reviews at a rate of about 23 reviews each minute by mid-2011. That’s a lot of people talking about the over-cooked pasta or fluffy hotel pillows.

It's like obituaries, when you die they finally give you good reviews. -- Roger MarisClick To Tweet

A Review Of Brand Monitoring

You’re a business owner. You know you need to hear what customers are saying about your business. But how to do it? First off, if you haven’t staked your claim on these sites, stop reading now. Do that first. We tell you how to do that here.

If you’ve been with us for even a few weeks, you’ve already done some important steps in setting up TodayLaunch to help you monitor customer feedback:

1. You learned how to respond to negative feedback. (Learn it here.)
2. You mastered the basics of setting up a monitoring system for Twitter, Facebook, and general online feedback. (Learn it here.)
3. You beefed up your Twitter search settings and aren’t missing a thing your customers are saying there, either. (Learn it here.)

Next up?

TripAdvisor, that 45 million-review behemoth. If your business is in the food, hotel, or travel industry, you’ll want to monitor TripAdvisor. Happily, this particular site allows you to grab an RSS feed of reviews left on your specific business listing page. This makes it super easy to monitor.

 Adding TripAdvisor To TodayLaunch

We’re going to use the same Monitor you’ve already set up for your brand on TodayLaunch. You probably have a variety of Twitter and internet search terms in your brand’s Monitor already. We’re just going to add a simple RSS feed from your TripAdvisor page to that.

1. Find the Monitor you created for your brand. Select it.

Find the Monitor you created for your brand. Click on it.

2. Go to the ‘Settings’ area in the upper right corner of TodayLaunch.

Click on the ‘Settings’ area to add to your Monitor.

3. Clicking on the ‘Settings’ will open your Monitor settings. Click on the ‘Feed’ tab.

Click on the ‘Feed’ tab to add an RSS feed to your current Monitor.

4. Head on over to TripAdvisor and open up your business listing. You should see an RSS icon or notation in your browser’s bar. Clicking on that will lead you to your RSS feed.

Find the RSS feed for your TripAdvisor listing.

If you’re having difficulty locating your feed URL, you can cheat a bit. Look at the URL for your business’s page. It looks something like this (I’m using a local restaurant called The Toasted Frog as an example):

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g49709-d2017638-Reviews-The_Toasted_Frog-Bismarck_North_Dakota.html

The RSS feed URL form would be what you see below. Note the code in bold type; change that to reflect your business page’s code:

www.tripadvisor.com/Feeds-d2017638-treviews.xml

5. Once you have the feed URL in your Monitor, click ‘Add’ and ‘Done’ and…you’re done! Any new review on TripAdvisor will show up in your TodayLaunch Monitor, the same as any Twitter or online mentions.

Other review sites are less cooperative when it comes to useful RSS feeds. Yelp is the closest; it makes feeds available for specific users, friend groups, or geographic areas, but that’s it. You can bring feeds from Yelp into TodayLaunch the same way as described above.