Facebook Reviews Are Becoming Facebook Recommendations

[Garrett Sussman]

Facebook Reviews Are Becoming Facebook Recommendations

Now, when you go to a local business's Facebook page, instead of the ability to rate them 5 stars, you will now be presented with the binary option of whether you'd like to recommend them or not.

Read about how Facebook is adjusting 'reviews' going forward and how Grade.us is adjusting as a result.

Full article here.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for letting us know Garrett. I had not heard the news yet.

Never a dull moment in Local Search OR reputation management, right?
Lucky you guys are really good at dealing with all the changes.

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Thanks, Linda. Yep! Interesting to see how Facebook is focusing their efforts in the face of all of their 2017 challenges and bad publicity.

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Updated this article due to customers asking about 'missing' recommendations. I had a hypothesis, in case anyone else wants to chime in, I'd be curious to hear.

Here's what I think:

At Grade.us, we've had a few different customers mention to our support team that the numbers of reviews and recommendations are not matching up with the actual numbers of recommendations on their Facebook business pages.

In all cases, the numbers have been higher, and customers are wondering "Where are all of these reviews and recommendations that I'm not seeing?"

Unfortunately, Facebook isn't super transparent when it comes to explaining their data (as most of us know at this point - even though they're trying to be better about it).

That said, recommendations have been around for over 6 months, but only in private feeds until recently.

My theory is that when people ask for recommendations on their private feeds, and someone recommends a business, that recommendation counts towards your total number of recommendations, but does not actually show up on your company's recommendations.

Check out the example below:

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'm so glad I read this thread b/c it happened to Sterling Sky and I just rolled my eyes at Facebook for being so confusing with this update. That is a good theory!

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Thanks Joy! Yeah, we had a lot of customers asking about it the difference in counts. Nobody wants to miss out on positive mentions. I haven't seen any explicit mention about yet on the FB support forums, but it really would make sense.

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Bumping this since another comment on the blog let us know that a business saw a 3 star review converted into a 'not recommended' recommendation. Just so people are aware.

Also updated via an email that they're sending out to business owners that all reviews on the 5 star system will​ be converted to recommended and not recommended if they haven't been already.