Facebook isn’t just the biggest social media platform in the world. It’s also a place where customers can discover new businesses through online reviews. Facebook reviews & recommendations help to provide social proof to your customers and help your business get discovered.
Let’s talk about how your business can start collecting more Facebook reviews and grow revenue.
Here’s what every business owner
needs to know about Facebook reviews.
Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms on the Internet. It’s estimated that Facebook has more than 2.6 billion monthly active users. This presents a great opportunity for customers and prospects to engage with your business on the platform. They can like, share and comment on posts. Use Facebook Messenger to communicate directly with the business and can also leave a review (recommendation) showing their satisfaction.
Reviews posted on Facebook are meant to represent the genuine experiences of real customers. As a result, potential customers value the social proof they provide. Studies show that 92% of customers consult reviews before making any purchase decision. Facebook is the second-largest review site on the Internet, right behind Google reviews.
Facebook’s review system is unique, since it’s one of the few review sites on the Internet that doesn't use the overall star rating system.
While Facebook had used the overall star rating for many years, in 2018, the social media giant decided to switch to a binary system. Instead of recommending your business out of 5 stars, customers now have just two options to rate your business: Recommend or Don’t Recommend.
All of your old reviews are factored in as part of your Recommendation Score. This score takes into account your old reviews posted under the overall review rating as well as the ratio of customers who would recommend your business.
In its early days, Facebook had a proprietary algorithm called EdgeRank which determined what content showed up on users’ News Feed. The algorithm was based on three factors:
Affinity measures how much the user has interacted with your page in the past. The more they interact with the page, the more likely it is that you’ll show up in their News Feeds.
Weight measures the importance of each different interaction. Facebook sees some interactions as more important than others. For example, a review with a photo or a video is a more important interaction than a plain-text review.
This factor measures how long ago the customer’s interaction with your business took place. The more time passes, the less importance EdgeRank gives to the interaction.
Facebook's proprietary algorithm has gotten more and more complicated over the years. However, these three factors of affinity, weight, and time decay still hold great importance in determining what shows up in users’ News Feeds.
Facebook reviews affect two of these three factors: affinity and weight. That means the more reviews your business gets, the greater the likelihood of potential customers discovering your Facebook profile.
Facebook reviews don’t just help your business get discovered on Facebook. The more Facebook reviews that you have, the more visible your business is on search engines. Since reviews highlight the authentic opinion of local customers, Google values them highly when determining search ranking. According to Moz, reviews are the third-largest factor determining local search ranking.
It’s not just Google reviews that matter when it comes to SEO. Collecting reviews on all sites will help your business rank higher in relevant search results. Facebook is no exception. Since Facebook is an authoritative site, reviews posted on its platform are valued by Google.
Here’s how your business can get
started collecting and managing
Facebook reviews.
In order to start collecting Facebook reviews, you will need to create a Facebook business page. If you haven’t done this already, here’s how you can get started.
For more information, check our guide on creating a Facebook business page.
Here’s how your customers can leave a review on Facebook for your business.
Want to collect more recommendations on Facebook? Here’s how you can get started.
The harder the process of leaving a review is for the customer, the less likely they are to actually do it. A happy customer might say they’re willing to leave a review in person but might forget to do it as soon as they leave your store. After all, who has time to go and find your business’s Facebook page?
Luckily, there’s a way to make the process quick and easy for the customer. Just send review requests email and texts that link directly to your Facebook business page. All the customer has to do is click the link and leave a review.
To get the best results, make sure that you’re sending review requests on a regular basis. We’ve found that businesses get the best results when they send review requests on the same day as when a customer interacts with your business.
If a customer gets a review request a month after the transaction took place, they may no longer have a clear memory of the sale. In this case, chances are that even your most satisfied customers may not write a review for your business.
Some businesses are tempted to only ask a certain group of customers for reviews, who they know they think probably leave a positive review. When you are selective with review requests, you only end up hurting your business.
You're missing out on sending review requests to customers who probably would've recommended your business. You're also missing the opportunity to get honest feedback that can help you improve your business. So make sure you’re sending review requests to all of your customers.
Under no circumstance should you ever buy a Facebook review. Facebook has the right to ban businesses from the platform for violating terms of service. Buying Facebook reviews risks you losing access to the world’s biggest social network.
Plus, buying reviews will only undermine customer trust. If customers suspect that your reviews are fake, they’ll do their best to steer clear of your business.
In order to send Facebook reviews requests, it’s important to send a link directly to the review section of your profile. Here’s how you can get started.
Once you have a working link, you can start including it in email and text review requests that you can send to your customers.
There is no way that customers can leave anonymous Facebook reviews. The name and the profile of the reviewer will always be visible.
To make sure that you get notifications for every new Facebook review, make sure that you follow the following steps.
Once you do this, you’ll be able to stay on top of all the reviews that get posted to your Facebook business page.
You do have the option to turn off customer reviews on your Facebook business page. Once you do this, visitors to your page cannot see any reviews, positive or negative.
Here’s how you can turn off all customer reviews:
Even though you can turn off reviews on your Facebook business page, we do not recommend it. If you are worried about getting negative reviews consider actively soliciting reviews from all your customers. Most of the time, only customers who feel that they’ve had strong negative experiences are motivated to leave reviews. Soliciting reviews is an easy way to balance the scales.
There is no way for a business owner to remove Facebook reviews posted on their business page without turning off reviews entirely. The only people who can delete these reviews are Facebook moderators or the reviewer who wrote them.
While you can report Facebook reviews (more on that in the next section), there’s no guarantee that Facebook will actually remove the review. That’s why we recommend responding to the review (more on that later).
Here’s how you can report a review that you think is fake.
Customers expect responses to their reviews. This is a great way to show that your business is willing to listen to the problems of each individual customer. A study by Harvard Business Review showed that when businesses respond to all their customer reviews, they typically see more reviews and a higher overall star rating.
Here’s how you can respond to a Facebook review.
Here’s how you can respond to positive Facebook reviews.
Thank the customer for the feedback- A "thank you" can go a long way in showing your appreciation and building customer loyalty.
Keep it short and sweet- Responding to a positive review is should be short and sweet. There’s no reason to turn it into a long essay.
Encourage the customer to come back- Leave a short note to show the customer you’d be happy to serve them again. This can be as simple as "We hope to see you soon!"
Here’s how you can respond to negative Facebook reviews.
Apologize for the bad experience- The first step is simply saying “Sorry”. Show the customer that you regret their negative experience.
Be polite- A bad review can be frustrating, but avoid the urge to lash out. It’s important to be polite because other customers are looking at your review responses to see what kind of service they can expect from you.
Ask the customer to contact you directly- Provide a phone number or an email so that the customer can contact you. That way, any potential back and forth will not be in public view. Plus, if you’re able to resolve the problem in a private setting, there’s a good chance the customer can be persuaded to edit or even delete their original review.
If you see a review that you think didn’t come from a real customer, call it out. While you should remain polite, you should also let potential customers who read the review know that it isn’t an accurate representation of your customer experience.
Want to share your Facebook reviews on your website? Here’s how you can get started.
Birdeye is the most comprehensive reputation management software on the market. With Birdeye you can automatically send review requests, respond to customer reviews from 150+ sites in a single dashboard, get actionable insights with Natural Language Processing (NLP), and get a custom-built profile that will help your business get discovered by customers.
There's no competitor on the market that offers all these services in a single platform. In fact, Birdeye has been named the #1 company in the reputation management space by G2 8 straight times.
Find out how Birdeye can help you get more Facebook reviews.
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