Recommendations on Your Facebook Page

A question instead of stars

Since last August, Facebook business pages have stopped asking visitors for a star rating. They ask one question instead: do you recommend this business, yes or no.

The answer comes with a few words of explanation, and it appears publicly on the page.

Many owners have not looked closely at the change. Some find out when a no arrives, written by a customer who might once have left three stars.

That no deserves a reply, and the section deserves a decision about whether it stays switched on.

What a visitor sees

Somebody checking your page before they visit or book takes in a few things quickly.

• The rating out of five, blending recommendations with older star reviews.
• The number of people behind that rating.
• The words of recent recommendations, yes and no alike.
• Your replies beneath them, or their absence.
• The older star reviews from before last August.

The fourth is the only part you write. A no with a calm, specific reply beneath it tells the next reader how you treat people when something goes wrong.

Why a no weighs more than three stars did

Stars allowed shades of opinion. A customer who was mostly happy but kept waiting could leave four, and one who was disappointed could leave three.

A recommendation has no middle. Mild disappointment that would once have earned three stars now has to choose, and some of it chooses no.

On a page with only a handful of recommendations, a single no is also hard to miss.

That makes the written reason, and your reply to it, more important than the yes or no itself. The words are where a mild complaint shows itself to be mild.

Replying to a no

Reply publicly, as the page, within a day or two. The person who wrote it is notified, and everyone who reads the page later sees the exchange.

Thank them for saying something, name the specific problem, and say what has changed or what you will do. Leave out excuses, and do not argue about whether they were right.

Offer a way to continue the conversation privately, with a name to ask for and a phone number or email address.

Keep it short. Three or four sentences is plenty, and a long defence reads as defensive however polite it is.

Write it for the next customer as much as for this one. They will read the no and your reply together, and judge the business on both.

A worked example

An escape room business with three rooms in a light industrial unit takes most of its bookings from groups who find it on Facebook. Its page had a few dozen recommendations, nearly all yes.

Then a no appeared. A birthday group had arrived fifteen minutes late, been given the time left on the clock, and run out of it before solving the room. The recommendation called the business inflexible.

The owner's first instinct was to switch recommendations off altogether. That would have hidden every yes on the page along with the one no.

Instead the reply thanked the group, explained that sessions run back to back so late arrivals lose time, and said booking confirmations would now state the arrival time clearly.

The confirmation email was changed the same week, and the booking page gained a line asking groups to arrive fifteen minutes early.

The no is still there, with its reply beneath it. Anyone reading it can see what happened and what the business did about it.

Replying to the yeses

Positive recommendations deserve a reply too, though a short one. Thank the person and mention something specific they wrote.

A page where every recommendation has an answer shows that somebody is paying attention. One where only the complaints are answered looks as though it only reads the complaints.

Recommendations that break the rules

A recommendation can be reported to Facebook from its menu if it breaks Facebook's community standards, for example with hate speech, harassment or spam.

A negative opinion, however unfair it feels, usually does not qualify, and reporting it achieves little. A reply does more.

If you genuinely cannot find the person as a customer, say so politely in the reply and invite them to get in touch with the details.

Turning the section off

A page's admins can switch recommendations off. In the page's settings, under Templates and Tabs, turning off the Reviews tab removes the section and the rating from the page.

It removes everything, the yeses along with the no, which makes it a poor decision to take in a hurry over one complaint.

Customers who want to complain can still comment on posts or send a message. Turning the section off removes a place for praise more reliably than it removes complaints.

Whether to keep it on

For a page somebody looks after every week, with mostly positive recommendations, the section is worth far more switched on than off.

It is also more visible than it looks. Google sometimes shows ratings from other sites, Facebook among them, beside a business's own search listing.

Switching off makes sense when nobody monitors the page, when the page is barely used, or when replying in any detail would breach a client's confidentiality.

Whichever you choose, check who receives the page's notifications. A no that reaches only an admin who rarely logs in can sit unanswered, in public, for weeks.

The counter-case

Recommendations matter less for some businesses than for others.

A business whose customers rarely use Facebook, or that sells mainly to other businesses, may receive a recommendation a year. The decision about the section is then a small one.

Regulated professions may have rules about testimonials, and a practice that cannot discuss a client's situation in public may reasonably keep the section off.

For a business with an active page, though, the advice holds: leave it on, read it weekly, and answer every no calmly and specifically.

This week

1. Open the page as a visitor sees it.
2. Read every recommendation since last August.
3. Reply to each no calmly and specifically.
4. Thank the yeses in a line each.
5. Fix what the complaints describe, where you can.
6. Make sure notifications reach someone who reads them.
7. Decide whether the section stays on.

Step five is the one readers notice. A reply saying what changed is only convincing when the change is real, as the next customer will find out.

The rules on asking for reviews in the first place are covered in review rules most businesses break without knowing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.