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18 Online Review Statistics Every Marketer Should Know

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18 Online Review Statistics Every Marketer Should Know

Online reviews are an unavoidable part of doing business in today’s digital age.

Every marketer worth their salt knows that online reputation is everything.

Whether you own or manage a small mom-and-pop restaurant, a computer software company, or a chain of coffee shops, your customers are likely to look for you online.

That means one of the first things they’ll do is look for online reviews about your business.

Of course, positive reviews help you to create a trusted brand, which people are more likely to purchase from. However, how you respond to negative reviews also says much about your business.

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Why Online Reviews Are So Powerful

Yelp, Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, and similar are a boon for consumers, giving them a platform to learn about businesses before patronizing them.

For business owners? Not so much.

It seems that no matter how hard you try, you’re bound to get that one bad review that could potentially overshadow all your glowing reviews.

Online reviews, however, are an unavoidable part of doing business online.

For millennials, reviews are empowering, helping them make an informed and thought-out purchase decision (useful when deciding if a restaurant’s $15 avocado toast is worth it).

If you still aren’t completely on board, here are online review statistics that may change your mind.

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1. Positive & Negative Reviews Influence Consumers

According to a 2021 report by PowerReviews, over 99.9% of customers read reviews when they shop online.

Furthermore, 96% of customers look for negative reviews specifically. This figure was 85% back in 2018.

When people look for bad reviews, they’re interested in knowing some of the company’s weaknesses. Where could they improve? If the downfalls are minor, it makes the researcher feel assured.

A near-perfect rating is often viewed as less credible and leads to consumer skepticism if reviews are too positive.

2. Consumers Trust Reviews Like Recommendations From Loved Ones

BrightLocal’s local consumer survey shows that 49% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members.

Screenshot from BrightLocal, January 2023

When you consider just how much we trust the people we love, it’s compelling to think that every 1 in 2 people trust online reviews as much.

However, the research reveals that some occasions cause consumers to suspect a review’s validity. So, you do need to be mindful of this.

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Situations that can raise suspicion that a review may be fake include:

  • The review is overboard in its praise (45%)
  • The review is one of many reviews with similar content (40%)
  • The reviewer uses a common pseudonym or is anonymous (38%)
  • The review is overboard in negativity (36%)
  • The review is one of only a few positive amongst many negative reviews (32%)
  • The review contains hardly any text and is just a star rating (31%)

3. The More Reviews, The Better Reputation

The More Reviews, the BetterScreenshot from BrightLocal, January 2023

BrightLocal’s research also found that 60% of consumers feel that the number of reviews a business has is critical when reviewing and deciding whether to use its services.

Although this has dropped since 2020, it’s still a high figure, especially compared to 2019, 2018, and 2017.

4. Most Consumers Don’t Trust Advertising

While online reviews are seeing a rise in consumer trust, the same can’t be said for traditional advertising.

According to Performance Marketing World, 84% of millennials don’t trust conventional advertising.

If anything, this finding is a sign of the times. People are tired of ads being pushed on their faces, especially ads that belie the truth of the quality of the products and services they get from brands.

5. Shoppers Research Product Reviews On Their Phones – Outside Of Your Store

OuterBox recently revealed that every 8 in 10 shoppers use their smartphones to look up product reviews while they are in-store.

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Before buying an item, shoppers will quickly search to see what other people have had to say about the product in question.

Some will compare prices, determining whether they can find the item elsewhere cheaper.

This statistic shows how the online and offline worlds are becoming increasingly integrated. If you don’t have a good online review presence, it can have a negative impact on the number of sales you make in-store.

6. Reviews Shared On Twitter Increase Social Commerce

Yotpo has revealed that reviews on social media platforms increase social commerce, especially on Twitter. You can see this displayed in the chart below:

Reviews Shared on Twitter Increase Social Commerce by More Than 6%Screenshot from Yotpo.com, January 2023

When we think of social media, we associate it with building brand awareness. However, it’s also effective for driving sales.

Shopify recently published a survey that revealed the average conversion rate for the social media websites represented in the graph above:

  • The average conversion rate for LinkedIn is 0.47%
  • The average conversion rate for Twitter is 0.77%
  • The average conversion rate for Facebook is 1.85%

Yotpo Data found that when reviews are shared on social platforms, the conversion rate is 5.3 times higher for LinkedIn, 8.4 times higher for Twitter, and 40 times higher for Facebook.

All these statistics show us that reviews are an incredibly powerful form of social proof that results in higher conversion levels across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

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Furthermore, a lot of the eCommerce world is underestimating Twitter’s force.

7. Reviews Are Just As Important Among Jobseekers

If you thought consumers were the only ones concerned about reviews, think again.

Research published by Glassdoor indicates that 86% of employees and job seekers research reviews on a business and ratings to determine whether they should apply for a job.

Google Reviews on GlassdoorScreenshot from Glassdoor.com, January 2023

As competition for talent in certain industries gets tougher, companies will have no choice but to be more conscious about their employer brand if they wish to attract top talent.

8. 3.3 Stars Is The Minimum Rating Customers Accept

When deciding whether to engage with a business, it has been indicated that 3.3 stars out of 5 are the lowest rating customers are likely to consider.

If you have a lower rating than this, your business may be overlooked and lose valuable consumers to the competition.

It probably does not come as a shock to discover that only 13% of consumers will contemplate using a company with a rating of 2 stars or less.

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9. Sustainability Is A Recurring Theme In Travel Reviews

The Expedia.com Travel Recovery Trend Report revealed that the environment and sustainability are two chief themes for online guest reviews.

Some of the terms most typically found in reviews include the following:

  • Renewable energy
  • LED light bulbs
  • Electric car charging
  • Single-use plastics
  • Recycling

Expedia believes that millennial and Gen-Z travelers are more likely to consider environmentally friendly travel options.

10. 18 – 34 Year Olds Trust Online Reviews as Much as Personal Recommendations

Research shows that 91% of 18 to 34-year-olds trust reviews online just as much as personal recommendations.

Let’s think about this for a second: we’re now trusting online comments just as much as we trust feedback from the people we know and love.

This shows how much high regard millennials and Gen Z give to online reviews.

11. Tiny Subject Line Changes Can Get More Reviews

When soliciting reviews, most businesses send an email post-purchase.

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Yotpo studied the subject lines of 3.5 million of these post-purchase review request emails to discover what works and what doesn’t when asking customers for reviews.

While this is much more than a single statistic, here is a synopsis of the top subject line tweaks to get more reviews:

  • An emotional appeal doesn’t greatly impact the review response rates.
  • Include your store name to increase reviews.
  • Incentives inspire more reviews in every industry.
  • Ask a question in the subject line.
  • Exclamation points boost reviews for food and tobacco businesses!
  • Avoid using a totally uppercase word in your subject lines.

12. Reputation Management Software Pays For Itself

Podium released a very interesting report on online reviews, stating that 94% of local companies who utilize a reputation management tool make up for the cost with the ROI.

How your company appears online massively dictates what shows up in terms of your bottom line.

Because of this, companies are investing more in their reputations than ever before.

One way they do this is by investing in reputation management software. This gives them the ability to have clarity regarding how their business is reviewed online.

13. Customers Believe A Product Should Have 100+ Reviews

Power Reviews recently posted interesting statistics about the number of reviews shoppers want.

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In a perfect world, 43% of consumers have indicated that they want to see more than 100 reviews for an item.

Take a look at the table below to see consumer expectations regarding review volume:

43% of Customers Believe a Product Should Have 100+ ReviewsScreenshot from PowerReviews.com, January 2023

Consumers indicate that a notably high volume of reviews can have a big, positive impact on their purchase likelihood.

Out of those surveyed, 64% indicated that they would be more likely to purchase an item if it had over 1,000 reviews than if it only had 100 reviews.

Furthermore, 54% are more likely to purchase an item if it has 10,000+ reviews compared to 1,000 reviews. So, more is always better when it comes to quantity.

14. Few Travelers Post Unsolicited Online Hotel Reviews

BrightLocal has also uncovered that 78% of travelers never post unsolicited online hotel reviews. This means you cannot simply rely on customers to post hotel reviews of their own free will. They need to be encouraged to do so.

Customers say that the main ways they have been asked to leave a review are as follows:

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  • Via email (41%)
  • During the sale/in-person (35%)
  • When receiving an invoice or receipt (35%)
  • SMS text (27%)

You need to be mindful of how you approach customers when asking to leave a review. The last thing you want to do is come across as pushy. At the same time, you want to make customers feel compelled to post a comment.

Offering an incentive, such as a special discount or entry into a competition, is a good approach.

15. Consumers Are Becoming Increasingly Suspicious Of Facebook Reviews

While online consumers rely on reviews to make purchasing decisions, they’re also suspicious of fake reviews. In fact, 93% of Facebook account holders are suspicious of fake reviews on this social media platform.

Consumers Are Becoming Increasingly Suspicious Of Facebook ReviewsScreenshot from Brightlocal, January 2023

As you can see from the table, only 7% of users don’t feel at all suspicious about Facebook reviews.

Users also have low trust in Google, Yelp, and Amazon reviews.

16. Most Consumers Use Rating Filters

Did you know that 7 in 10 consumers utilize rating filters when looking for companies?

Out of all the different rating options, the most popular is to narrow down a search based on the rating it is, for example, to only show hotels with ratings of four stars or above.

This helps customers only view products, locations, and services that fall within their standards. No one wants to waste their time on things that don’t fit!

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17. Customers Expect You To Respond To Negative Reviews Within 7 Days

When customers post negative reviews about a business, they expect a response. Not only this, but they don’t want to wait around for it.

Review Trackers have stated that 53% of customers expect companies to respond to negative feedback within one week.

One in three consumers has a shorter timeframe than this; three days or less.

Therefore, you really need to ensure you’re keeping up with the reviews you receive and responding appropriately.

18. Your Response To A Review Can Change How Customers View Your Business

Podium’s 2021 State of Reviews publication revealed that 56% of consumers had changed their perspective on a business based on how they responded to a review.

We know that it can make you feel sick to your stomach when you receive a bad review from a customer. However, this statistic shows that there is the potential to turn this into a positive.

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If you respond empathetically and try to understand the customer, they will feel like you really care about them and the service they receive. You can turn an unsatisfied customer into a loyal one.

And, even if the consumer who has complained does not reply, the fact you’ve tried to rectify their grievance will show your business in a positive light when others read the review.

The Bottom Line On The Impact of Online Reviews

These statistics reveal one unavoidable truth: online reviews are important and are here to stay.

Simply put, online reviews are directly linked to consumer trust and creating social proof.

Rather than fear them, you should look at them as a way to get a direct line to your customers.

If you are yet to begin your efforts to manage your online reputation, now’s as good a time as any to get started by doing the following:

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  • Educate your customers on the importance of leaving reviews, but make sure to communicate that these reviews will help you improve your business, which can only be a good thing for them.
  • Take charge of your brand on all review platforms. Respond to feedback and make sure complaints are managed in a timely and orderly fashion.
  • Claim your Google Business Profile to ensure that any information about your business on Google is accurate and updated.
  • Ask and encourage your customers to leave a review of your product or service.

More resources:

Featured Image: ParinPix/Shutterstock



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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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