Facebook page rating keeps fluctuating

[Alex Avellaneda]

Hi, there.
We've got one Facebook page that did not get any new reviews/recommendations since August. However, the rating keeps fluctuating, and downward for the past few weeks, from 4.7 to 4.1 today.

- Although Facebook states that only Recommendations that are shared publicly are included in a Page's overall rating, could they possibly include those shared privately as well?
- Other than recommendations and old reviews/ratings, is there anything else they could use to calculate the rating?
Thank you!

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Alex Avellaneda, that's a tough one. Especially because I don't know how many reviews were up when you were at 4.7 vs. how many reviews were on the page when you dropped to 4.1.

My first guess is that a bunch of reviewers' accounts got deleted, wiping out their reviews in the process.

Another possibility is that you had a big spike of reviews that were 1-4 stars, lowering your average.

This is unlikely, but if you merged an old (perhaps "unofficial") Facebook page into the current one, and those reviews transferred over, then that could affect your average rating.

 

[Alex Avellaneda]

Thank you so much for the pointers, @Phil Rozek.

This page currently has 111 reviews, 23 not recommended, 80 recommended, and (from the old rating system) 7 five-stars and 1 two-stars.

When doing the math, assuming that the numerical translation for a not recommended is 1, and 5 for a recommended, the average is 4.14, so the current 4.1 rating appears to checks out.

Looking at the removed reviews recorded in our monitoring tool for this page, the most recent one is from last year and the others from the years before. If new ones were removed since August this year, which we have no record of, that would mean an awful lot of them to drop from 4.7 to 4.1, at least 150+ recommendations (based on the current number of reviews, and assuming that the numerical translation above is correct).

We didn't receive any new public reviews, and no merging occurred since August.

I am not sure if other signals are now used to calculate ratings, or if Facebook somehow just recalculated the rating for this one page. This is concerning...

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Alex Avellaneda, interesting. At least for now, I'm stumped. I've never heard of Facebook filtering reviews (as in by putting them into a "not recommended" pile, as Yelp does), so one of two possible concrete explanations I can think of is that enough good reviews got filtered that your average went down. (Again, that assumes Facebook filters reviews now, which I've never seen, so either it's new or I need to start wearing glasses.) The other possible concrete explanation (I can think of) is that Facebook's new method of determining average rating threw off the monitoring too.

The squishier explanation is that Facebook takes into account some odd factors, like "likes," and doesn't reveal how they do it (or even whether they do it).

I'd be interested to hear whether there's a "Eureka" moment.

 

[Alex Avellaneda]

@Phil Rozek, by "not recommended" I meant people that did not recommend the page when reviewing it.

I chatted with FB support yesterday and they couldn't give me a straight answer regarding the signals/sources used. Regarding the rapid decline from 4.7 to 4.1, they just said it could be a bug, and that they'll investigate...

On Dec 24, the rating was 4.1, based on the opinion of 106 people.

On Dec 27, the rating was up to 4.2, based on the opinion of 115 people.

Yesterday, the rating was back to 4.1, based on the opinion of 116 people.

We're going to run some tests with a dozen pages over the next couple of weeks to see if we can get some answers in regards to the signals/sources used.

 

[Eoghan_Aircam]

Since FB moved to recommendations, a user is putting a 1 or 5 star weighted rec against your page.

The private recs a user posts where only friends can see them are also factored in. Only public ones are surfaced to the business or through the API.

Engage in some review gen efforts and point traffic to FB to drive the rating back up.