Businesses with plenty of positive online reviews on their social media helps to build trust, reliability and credibility with potential customers. Reviews and recommendations are often used to make a purchasing decisions, including on social media.
Specifically, your Facebook business page can include reviews which can be utilised across your marketing strategy. Reviews can be used to help demonstrate to visitors that your business has real, authentic recommendations that can be trusted on your Facebook page.
Facebook reviews help to generate social proof for your business, which can help to increase traffic to your website and increase conversions, ahead of your competitors.
A survey found 87% of online consumers read reviews of online businesses, showing how important it is to both have reviews and ideally predominantly positive reviews too. Our blog post will look at how Facebook reviews can be left for a business, how to showcase them and make the most of each Facebook review.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Receiving Facebook reviews
The first important stage for businesses with a business page on Facebook, if they are happy for people to leave reviews for their business is to enable reviews on Facebook within Business Manager. Once enabled this can be shared as a link to generate reviews from new customers or previous customers.
For example this could be shared as part of an email campaign to request a customer leaves a review for you. This can be done for various review sites including requesting specifically a Facebook recommendation. The more reviews received the better this will look to visitors to your Facebook page, particularly if they had a positive experience they are happy to share.
It is worth noting Facebook reviews have changed, previously it would have page’s rating such as a star system with 5 star ratings being the highest rating for Facebook ratings. However now when social media users go to a business page for the reviews section, it will ask if they would or wouldn’t recommend the business.
Once selected, it then provides a pop up asking for any text they wish to leave with the recommendation. Therefore no longer leaving a Facebook rating, it is a recommendation instead of a star rating.
It is important to engage with your followers and customers on social media, therefore we recommend responding promptly to all reviews left on your Facebook business page. With an added personal touch where possible, such as tailored to their recommendation or from knowing the product or service they used.
Trust and Credibility
When a customer is happy to leave feedback it helps to benefit the business’s visibility. Depending on their settings when they leave the review, their friends on Facebook will also see it within their newsfeed for new Facebook recommendations, giving your Facebook page additional organic reach. Giving exposure to potential customers you may not otherwise have reached.
Pages on Facebook should aim to have a high level of positive reviews both in quantity and the quality of the positive experience shared on your Facebook profile. For potential customers who have not yet used your business, they would typically find reviews for your product or service helpful to understand the experience of others.
When visitors to your Facebook page on the social network read review after review that is positive, even for small businesses, it creates trust and credibility through social proof. Visitors are more trusting of third party recommendations, as opposed to a business purely saying they are good at what they offer.
It is allowing businesses to build a strong brand presence which could be across multiple sources, not just Facebook to demonstrate and show customer satisfaction and have regular new reviews. It is useful where possible to have recent reviews as the date the review is left will be shown.Out of date reviews will likely be less credible, than there being more Facebook reviews left recently.
Constructive Criticism
Ultimately there could be times where you receive negative reviews. This on the whole should be less likely, as a study found 63% of people online have written a positive review. Whereas, only 32% have shared a negative review online.
However, if you do receive any negative reviews on any of your Facebook business pages the best approach is to tackle it head on, responding immediately to offer a suitable solution. This response will be seen by other visitors such as their Facebook friends. When a business provides a suitable resolution and rectifies an issue, this often can reduce the impact of negative reviews.
Equally if you receive any fake reviews on the business Facebook page, these can be reported to Facebook with their interaction limited going forward. Therefore, this shouldn’t be a reason to not encourage customers to leave a review. Also fake reviews are often obvious, so likely dismissed by a visitor anyway when looking at your reviews, as they do not come across as genuine or clearly spam.
If there is validity to any negative feedback, it is recommended to be used as a business opportunity. It can be fed back to the relevant team to help them improve the experience in the future for customers.
It can be better to know any issues upfront to give your business the opportunity to resolve and improve the business for stronger customer satisfaction going forward. When negative feedback is tackled, long term it could lead to having an increase in positive reviews due to the changes made from the constructive feedback a customer leaves.
Showcase Reviews
As part of your marketing strategy past reviews and recommendations can be used in many ways to help increase traffic to your website, generate increased sales and brand awareness.
This could include using the text from the positive feedback on Facebook and creating a branded graphic using your brand assets and styling. With the post highlighting how helpful your business was to that customer and your appreciation for receiving the review.
Another route could be to create a case study from the detailed feedback received. It could be structured to use as a Facebook post or for content on other social media platforms, along with including on your own website.
Both of these routes mean when someone for your business leave Facebook reviews, it is not only seen on the review tab. It can be maximised to showcase elsewhere as part of your marketing strategy to make the most of the review on your business pages.
It is also worthwhile keeping a consistent eye for any user generated content with positive feedback which could be used as part of your social content. Such as the business being tagged but a user with their experience. This could be shared to your own Facebook page and also engage with the user generated content.
We hope our blog post was useful to demonstrate how reviews and recommendations from customers on social media can be beneficial for a business. It helps to build trust and credibility through social proof.
Giving businesses the opportunity when encourage customers to leave a review, to generate more business opportunities to increase sales and brand awareness.
At 1PCS Creative we provide social media management, which includes showcasing positive reviews as part of your social content. We also provide community management, responding to all comments timely and engaging with your audience.
An important part to building a strong brand presence on social media. Please feel free to get in touch to see how we can help with your social media management.