Facebook star ratings allow customers the voice and opportunity to provide feedback about certain businesses they have dealt with.
Apart from being a core insight into how your business is interacting with customers, these star ratings also function as a tool Facebook uses to position your business page on its platform.
Much like Google rankings that help with the relevancy of searches, Facebook has an algorithm based off interactions between a Facebook user and a business, which helps determine where and how often that business’ posts will end up in the news feed.
Star ratings have a direct impact on this equation which can ultimately affect your businesses overall organic reach and brand visibility on Facebook.
To start with the upfront negatives of Facebook ratings, they can be:
- Damaging to businesses reputation: At the end of the day, there is no pleasing everyone, so the likelihood you will receive a negative review in the lifetime of your Facebook page is high. Ultimately these will gain more attention from prospective customers than positive ones as people always want to know what could go wrong when purchasing from you. From a survey completed in 2013, it outlined that 79% of respondents said they trusted online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, and in the end the outlook from past purchasers may just be the difference between gaining a new one and losing them
- Open to spam: Due to the lack of a verification process in the Review system, your Facebook page can become filled with irrelevant posts that you are unable to delete and perhaps even from people that haven’t even been in contact with your business or products. As part of the terms of service with this feature, individual users can delete reviews they have posted, yet admins do not have the same privilege.
- Can show up elsewhere and are difficult to control: At present, the greatest amount of control admins have over this feature on their business’ Facebook page is either turning it on or off. With the feature enabled your star rating shows up right underneath your pages name and can even filter out into external pages and sites in which the data is automatically pulled through.
- You are exposed to your own downfalls and weaknesses: With such a public platform open to everyone, your business is confronted with having its weaknesses and downfalls openly exposed. If there is something that you know your business needs to work on and is already attempting to control, having it picked up on and noted in a review publicly discloses the issue and may create an extra level of difficulty in resolving it.
Positives that come from these and extend:
- Informative for both you and customer: The clearest advantage – and also partly disadvantage – is the tangible nature of reviews. This raw data is, mostly, from people that have firsthand dealt with you or your products. This means you are getting feedback directly on how you are performing and looking after your customers’ needs. On the one hand, numerous 5 star reviews help encourage your prospect customers, whilst anything less demonstrates to you what you can improve on. Overall, Facebook reviews are an effective communicative tool between you and your customers.
- Builds reputation and credibility in the eyes of your customers: Statistics demonstrate that these ratings have a direct relationship to the choices customers make about whether to buy from you or not, with average consumers spending approximately 31% more on a business that has excellent reviews. It’s also been shown that a business’s responsiveness to its customers’ feedback and questions is a key feature to developing trust and loyalty from them.
- Depending on how it is handled, negative criticism can result in more sales and customer loyalty: As noted above, sometimes the benefit from negative reviews is the businesses’ ‘second chance’ to fix mistakes and build credibility with customers. A business being able to openly admit that it makes mistakes is viewed very fondly upon by customers, and generally what’s look at in negative reviews, isn’t necessarily the review itself but how the business looked after the customer that hasn’t had a good experience. This is vital to creating a connection with clients that is less to do with a transaction and more to do with a relationship.
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