Facebook Business Reviews – A How to Guide to Getting 5 Star Ratings

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facebook business reviews tips

Facebook business reviews can make or break a business. Yes, it seems trite but that is the reality of it in 2020. 

The vast, vast majority of us will turn to review sites before we purchase or product or engage in a service and for millions of us Facebook is our one stop review show. For businesses this means that having a positive Facebook review presence is a must. So, how is this achieved? We take a look at all of the ins and outs below. 

Why Do You Need Facebook Reviews For Your Business?

It is a fact that 97% of people who use the internet actually look for online reviews before buying any product or service from a company. As a result, the majority of customers will look for reviews of your company on Google and look at the reviews on your local listing. 

With that said, far more people turn to Facebook as oppose to Google in order to find reviews. These are the statistics:

– 74% of internet users check Facebook pages in order to find out more about a company/business. 

– The majority of consumers prefer and trust Facebook reviews over Google reviews due to the fact that they trust Facebook a lot more when it comes to reviews. 

– 80% of potential customers will likely choose a business that has positive reviews on Facebook.

Is It Best To Enable The Review Function On Facebook?

The truth is, reviews can greatly help your business to get more customers. However, in the event that you already have reviews on your business website, you may be pondering if you should even get reviews on a whole other platform. 

The Advantages Of Getting Facebook Reviews

We will now look at three possible benefits of enabling the review functionality on your business’s Facebook page:

  1. When you enable your review function, your page will show a stare rating to go with the reviews. If you have a high star rating, then this will actually help you to get more customers and sales as it would provide social proof that you have a good company. 
  1. Your real customers would become a crucial part of your marketing plan since they will actually talk about their experience with your company and its products or services in their own words. They will talk about how your product helped them and solved their problems. Basically, the positive reviews of your customers will be like free ads. 
  1. Even if you get negative reviews, you can use this to show how good your customer service is. By doing so, you can help an unhappy customer and even turn them into a huge fan of you and your business. 

The Downsides Of Facebook Reviews

Unfortunately, there are a couple of downsides to enabling reviews on you Facebook page and they are as follows:

  1. There is the possibility that you will get low or negative ratings and reviews on Facebook while you’re trying to attract more people to your page. So, if you have issues within your business, these will likely be revealed in those negative reviews. As a result, it is best that you figure out the problems and fix them as soon as you can. 
  1. You’ll need to spend time checking and monitoring the reviews your page gets. Unfortunately, this takes up a lot of time but you can use a tool such as Yotpo which will help make the process a lot easier and faster. 
  1. Rating abuse can happen. People who leave ratings on your Facebook business profile are not required to show that they are a customer and have actually used your products and services. It is also quite challenging to report this type of low star rating in comparison to reporting actual reviews. So, if you experience negative rating abuse, it may be best to turn this feature off and we will look at how to do just that later on. 

How to Enable Reviews on Facebook

Once your Facebook page can get customer reviews, it is best to make this process as straightforward and simple as possible. You an actually customize your page’s tabs and add a reviews tab on the left side of the page. 

We will now look at the steps necessary to create this reviews tab. 

  1. Go to and click on settings. 
  2. Edit
  3. There is a section called Tabs and where there is the option labelled “Use default tabs”, turn it on. 
  4. Scroll down until you see an option to add a tab and add the “reviews” tab.

Once you have completed this process, you can actually order your tabs according to how you want your tabs to show. It is best to place the more important tabs higher up. If you want to get more reviews, make sure to place the review tab higher up. In order to re-align your tabs, place your cursor over the tab until the cursor turns into hand. Then, you click and drag it to the position you’d like it to be in. 

How to Get Positive Facebook Reviews

Once you have enabled your Facebook review option and it is easily accessible, the next step is to actually get reviews. There are many ways that you can get reviews on your Facebook page. 

  1. Get your customers to check-in at your business place

Facebook can encourage people who have actually used the check-in feature to write a review of the place or business. By encouraging your visitors to simply check-in, this can greatly improve the numbers of customers who write reviews. 

There are many ways to encourage customer check-ins such as:

– Have an updated Facebook page along with a good marketing strategy. 

Make sure that your brand is built up on social media which would make it an appealing place to check-in to.

– If your particular type of business is a restaurant, you can provide customers with the WiFi password and then ask them to check-in. The same can be done with other types of businesses. If you’re hosting an event, you can also encourage guests to check-in as well. 

  1. Send an invitation to create a Facebook review via email

In order to get reviews, you do need to ask for them. So, be sure to ask your customers to leave a review and you can even send out an email with that request to your current customers. This will help to drastically increase how many reviews your business gets. 

  1. Ask for reviews via a Facebook post

If you have lots of likes on your posts and page, then you should try to leverage your high fan base. Simply create a post and let your fans know that you’re trying to get reviews and ask them to write a review so that they can help others learn about your business. There are many people who would be very happy to write a review to help your business. 

It is very important that both you and your employees are constantly asking for reviews and feedback from your customers. As many as 70% of customers would actually happily leave a review once they are asked to do so. 

One great idea is to get a small countertop display which asks customers to leave a review. You can even place a sticker on the door of your business indicating the same or even saying that your business is on Yelp, Foursquare or TripAdvisor. 

Once you have a customer’s email address, you should definitely make the effort to send them an email a couple of days after they’ve made a purchase to write a review. It is very easy to automate this using a tool like Square Marketing.

  1. Provide great customer service

Once you have a business, you’ll need to answer questions from potential customers and customers. You’ll also need to address various issues or concerns. So, once you or your employee has addressed an issue, be sure to ask that customer for a review. This should become a part of your customer service process and it will greatly help to increase your review count. 

  1. Software

There are many tools and software that can help you interact with customers and even manage your reviews. 

  1. Provide incentives

Now, you need to be very careful when giving incentives to your customers or paying them for reviews as most review sites don’t like this and may even penalize your business. However, you can provide a small incentive to your customers to encourage them to write a review such as a free cookie, soft drink etc. This is very effective and will help you get more reviews. 

  1. Social media

It is best to talk to your followers and fans ever so often and ask for a review. This will build up your review count but you do need to be open to criticism.

Is It Possible To Delete Facebook Reviews?

You won’t be able to delete reviews from your Facebook page but you can disable the feature so that you don’t get more reviews. This is easy to do by going to your page’s settings and clicking on “templates and tabs”. There should be a couple of sections, go to the “settings” which is next to the “reviews” section. Turn off the “show reviews” switch in order to disable reviews. 

Doing this may not be the best course of action since it will also remove your positive reviews. With that said, it is possible to remove a particular review if it contains spam or doesn’t align with Facebook or other platform’s content guidelines and terms of use. You can actually report those types of reviews to Facebook and even mark them as spam. 

What To Do If You Get A Negative Review 

  1. Respond to the negative review and apologize. Make sure and acknowledge the issues of the customer and show that you care. 
  1. Add marketing into your response. For example, indicate that your business usually provides great attention to detail but in this instance you made a mistake. 
  1. Carry the conversation off of Facebook. Give your contact information so that the customer can call you directly to discuss the problem. 
  1. Be short and sweet with your responses. This will help prevent your customer from getting even more upset or lead to even worse feedback. It is best to keep your replies about 3 sentences long. 

If you have issues with reviews and need to start pushing things down on Google then this can help

Flagging Facebook Reviews

In the event that you receive a review that is in violation of Facebook’s community standards, you should definitely flag the review. These standards are for everyone that uses Facebook. So, if you think that a particular review is in violation of those standards, then you should do the following:

Click on the three horizontal dots that are located next to the review on the top right hand side of it. Then, select the report option and follow the instructions. This will lead to the review being checked by Facebook to see if it is in violation of their standards. Some of the options that you’ll need to choose from would include, if the review has no relevance to your page or business, if it shouldn’t be on Facebook etc. Simply choose the best option and provide details.

Bury negative Facebook reviews with positive reviews

It may be possible to get rid of some negative reviews, but there may still be a couple remaining ones. So, you you should respond to those remaining reviews as described above and then get many more positive reviews that talk about your business in a very positive manner. Now, it is important that you don’t give people rewards or other incentives in order to leave a review because the FTC is cracking down on these type of marketing behaviors.

All of these tips will help improve your Facebook reviews and help your business succeed through creating a more positive impression of itself.