Reviews on product detail pages of eCommerce products are critical. It seems those reviews that are written in present tense for an audience within close distance are most relevant.

““A 50-word review only using verbs in the present tense is about 5.5% more likely to be ‘liked’ than a 50-word review using no present-tense verbs at all,” says David Fang, a doctoral student at Stanford University and one of the paper’s authors. ”

“There was one twist to the authors’ finding. Their results showed that when people read reviews written by people living far away, verb tense matters a lot less. That was the case when the researchers asked a group of U.S. participants to read reviews they said originated in Australia.”