Facebook Replacing Business Reviews

In marketing, no form of advertising compares to word of mouth at scale. Online reviews have become a digital currency and a marketing vertical that no business owner can ignore. Positive reviews equate to income.

Facebook Reviews Becomes Recommendations

Facebook has become a major reviews platform and recently changed their feature to a new ‘Recommendations’ feature. The Recommendations feature is designed to cut down on artificial reviews.

How Facebook Recommendations is Different

1. Good Bye 5 Stars

Facebook Recommendations will move away from a 1 to a 5-star rating system, but will instead be based on a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ gateway to leaving a review. Using an example of our favorite local restaurant, ‘Local Dish’ you can see how this is now presented. 

While the platform will be moving away from a 1 to 5-star average, companies will not lose what they’ve gained (at least not yet). 

2. Rich Endorsements 

Rich endorsements allow for the opportunity to leave tags (to offer a quick 10,000 foot view of the highlights or lowlights of the business) along with the opportunity to easily upload photos and a more detailed review. 

The tag feature combats the kind of review whereby someone may leave a random three-star grade on a business with no explanation, only leaving question marks to its legitimacy to business owners and those reading reviews. 

Rich endorsements is only available for restaurants and coffee shops but will rollout to other industries including skydiving in the near future. 

3. Disputing a Review is Easier

If you’re a business owner who’s ever been frustrated by how difficult it is to contest a review (especially with Google Reviews), Facebook Recommendations presents a few welcomed additions to help contest unfair reviews. 

Facebook Recommendations provides these avenues for business owners to flag a negative review? 

• Recommendation not relevant
• Unfair recommendation
• Nudity
• Violence
• Harassment
• Suicide or Self-injury
• Spam
• Drugs
• Hate Speech

In Conclusion 

Facebook is actively working on improving the platform for users and business owners and this is a step in the right direction. The question that industry experts are most curious about is how the average 5-star rating will be affected by this new rollout.