With the growing importance of online reviews for small business owners, it’s great to see how massive platforms like Facebook; claiming to have the backs of its small business communities, modernize the space to bring better and more relevant information to consumers about these brands in this space.
Not only have reviews been a vital signal to search engines in their results rankings, but their vital for consumers doing their due diligence about the products, services, and solutions they’re in need of. Third party reviews have been the primary focus in the past few years as they have been assumed to be unbiased and without a personal objective of the brand. But, through that organized initiative one thing became increasingly more clear… consumers not only looked to feedback about a brand online, but they would give more weight to a trusted friend or family member who had a personal experience with that brand.
This way of thinking seemed to fly in the face of at least some of the methods used to approve published feedback in platforms like Yelp, or were all but absent from algorithm calculations in platforms like Google. However, in one of the largest, truly social, platforms in the marketplace today, Facebook is taking on the challenge of leveraging the opinions and insight from your trusted circle online and changing the way you provide feedback and review feedback about a brand.
Here are 5 Insights on What is Changing With Facebook Business Page Reviews.
- Ratings are now called Recommendations. Facebook has retired the star rating for their Business Pages. Now, when someone wants to create a review about a business or brand within Facebook they will, instead, choose to recommend or not recommend them.
- Easier to receive and make recommendations. Those members logged into Facebook with a valid profile and who tag a business in a photo or post will be asked if they want to publicly recommend the tagged business. This prompt will make the process of creating (or receiving) recommendations easier. This means they ‘author’ of the recommendation no longer needs to be on the Business Page to complete this step. When customers publicly recommend a small business or brand name in a Group or to their friends through a post, it will appear on the Business’s Facebook Page for everyone to see.
- More information available for businesses and consumers. Customers will be empowered to share important details by adding additional text or photos, or by selecting tags such as “Cozy atmosphere” or “Great service.” This tagging feature is very similar to business endorsements on LinkedIn.
- All existing reviews will be updated to a recommendation. None of the existing reviews already earned by a business will disappear. Instead, they will appear on the Business Page as recommendations.
- Brands have more options to dispute unfair recommendations. Business owners or brand managers will now be able to report what they believe to be unfair recommendations by simply selecting “Give feedback” in the post menu and sending a quick account of the content they believe is unfair or spam.
Recommendations are powerful personal endorsements from trusted sources with a personal connection between Facebook community members.
There will still be an overall rating available for the business, but this will now be based on how many people recommend or don’t recommend the Business Page on Facebook, in addition to any previous star ratings and reviews it had received.
And, for consumers looking for a recommendation from their trusted circle of friends and connections, they can post their inquiry on https://www.facebook.com/recommendations and receive instant feedback from those Facebook community connections.
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If you found this article or any of other blog articles useful to your business, we would appreciate YOUR recommendation on Facebook using @Back2BasicsMN in your post, photo tag, or under our reviews section at www.facebook.com/Back2BasicsMN/reviews!
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