Everything You Need to Know about Facebook Reviews

Are you a local business that gets reviews?  Reviews can be very powerful to draw in new customers.  Recent studies have shown that 88% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.  That’s HUGE!

Also Reviews show up much more prominently on mobile devices which is when people are near your location.   Allowing people to leave a review for your location on Facebook is a good idea and gives social proof to potential customers.

UPDATE:  Facebook Reviews are available for any type of Page.  All you need to do is to add the Review tab to your Page.  I think Reviews can be a valuable form of social proof for any type of business.

Here is everything you need to know about Facebook Reviews.  **This article contains updates from the original post.

1.  How to Enable Reviews or turn them off

The Ratings and Reviews feature (where you see the star rating on the main Facebook page) is available for any type of Page. For many types of Pages, the Reviews tab is on by default, reviews and star ratings are displayed. However, you can hide the Reviews tab if you want.

First go to to the Settings section on your Facebook Page and select Edit Page from the left sidebar.

Edit Facebook Page

 

Next scroll down to the Reviews section and make sure the Tab is set to On.  You may have to add a tab if you don’t see the Reviews tab there. Note that you can also get the direct URL address of your Reviews tab here to send to your customers.

 

Enable Facebook Reviews on Your Page

 

Enable or disable reviews on your Facebook page.

If you turn the Reviews off and then back on later, all the previous Reviews you have received will still be there.

2.  Responding to Reviews

As a Page owner, respond to the reviews by either Liking the review or posting a comment.  Do this for both positive and negative reviews.

Respond to reviewsRespond to reviews

3.  Deleting a Negative Review (Spoiler Alert: You Can’t)

Many Page owners wonder how they can delete a negative review.  In general, this is not a good practice – it’s better to respond to a negative review so that people who are looking at the reviews see that if there is a problem with your product or service, you care enough to correct the situation.

Deleting a Facebook Review

Only a the owner of the review can delete the review.

If you have a negative review, respond thoughtfully and try and take the situation offline (ask if they can give you a call or send an e-mail).  If you correct the situation, you can always ask the reviewer to post an update or even edit or delete the review.

If there is a text review along with a star rating, you can Report the Post to Facebook.  They will then decide if the review doesn’t meet their community guidelines and take it down if that is the case.  (And of course, I wouldn’t want to report this nice review)

Report a review to Facebook

Remember that reviews can be an indication of a real problem in your business if you are getting too many negative reviews.  Look at negative reviews as an opportunity.

You could also try and message the reviewer to see if they would take the review down.  Only the person who posted a review or Facebook can remove a review.

If you don’t want reviews to display at all, you can uncheck the box to display reviews but all the reviews that you have received will still remain if you enable them again in the future.

4.  Reviews and Featured Videos

When you enable Reviews and the Map on your Facebook Page, the map shows up in the about section on the left sidebar along with the reviews.

Reviews and map on Facebook
Reviews and map shows up on the left sidebar

 

When you have the map enabled, you can’t have a Featured Video that shows up in your About section on your left sidebar.  So that is one downside is that your Featured Video doesn’t show up as prominently but it’s much better to make it easy to find out your location.

Take a look at this quick video I did on Facebook Reviews.

Also, if you want to find the Reviews YOU have personally given to other businesses, you can look on your personal profile under the More menu (or it’s also available directly at your Facebook profile URL/reviews)
See your own Facebook Reviews

How about you? Are you using Reviews on Facebook? How are they helping your business? Share your thoughts in the comments below!