In business, reputation is everything. While it may take years to build, it can be struck down in a matter of hours. In today’s digital world, online reputation matters as much, if not more, than offline. Critical reviews that appear across social media can be hugely damaging. What’s more, critical reviews can sometimes be inaccurate and unfair.
There are some 90 million business pages on Facebook and 140 million businesses use Facebook to promote their products and services further.
What are Facebook Recommendations and Reviews?
These are customer business recommendations and reviews posted to a business’s Facebook page. Facebook recently relaunched their Reviews as Recommendations. Recommendations only provide the option to recommend, or not recommend your business. A positive recommendation automatically gets a 5 star rating and a critical recommendation a 1 star rating.
In many cases, Facebook Recommendations allow customers to share their positive experience with your business. Customers can indicate whether they recommend your business to others, something that is often seen as a powerful endorsement. As a result, businesses can enjoy increased sales and even improved local SEO rankings as your business is mentioned, rated and reviewed.
On the flip side, Facebook Recommendations also provide an outlet for unhappy customers to share their experience (and to say that they would not recommend your business to others).
There may be times when you want to remove a Facebook Recommendation. This could be for a fake or spam recommendation, or due to entirely inappropriate or inaccurate information that could damage your brand. Just bear in mind though that it is very difficult to get a recommendation removed once posted.
How to remove Facebook Recommendation
When you find recommendations that you believe require removal from your Facebook Page (i.e. they are fake), you’ll need to flag them and notify Facebook immediately. It’s not possible to delete them yourself.
In order for the Facebook team to check the recommendation, it will need to be reported. It’s worth pointing out that only recommendations with a comment on them can be reported. The Facebook team recommend that your business should comment constructively on any critical recommendation, even those you deem to be fake. This will then enable you to flag and report the recommendation accordingly and also show others that you are attempting to solve the problem in a constructive manner. Avoid calling out the fake recommendation publicly as this can appear defensive and also sow distrust amongst your audience.
Follow these straightforward steps to get the recommendation flagged with Facebook:
1. Find the recommendation you want to remove.
2. Navigate to the top right-hand corner and click on the three dots. A drop-down menu will pop up and select “Find support or report Recommendation.”
3. Click the option most relevant for you and hit “Send”.
The review is now registered with Facebook. Once they review your complaint, if they find the review to be fraudulent or against Facebook’s Community Standards, the team will remove it directly from your Business page.
Why you might not want to report and remove critical recommendation
We have talked lots on this blog about the importance of responding to all customer feedback and recommendation, even the bad ones! A genuine critical recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world. In many cases, this feedback can allow your business to make important changes and grow as a result. A full complement of 5-star recommendations is often mistrusted by consumers too, raising suspicions about fake recommendations.
Rather than removing these critical recommendations, consider responding positively and constructively, addressing the problems and showing that you are making efforts to improve the experience. This will allow others to see that you’re proactive and responsive.
How to hide Facebook Reviews (Recommendations)
If you’re still convinced that Facebook Recommendations aren’t for you, you can hide them entirely rather than removing. Hiding Facebook Reviews doesn’t delete the feedback, but simply hides them from view. The Facebook tab is still called Reviews, not Recommendations – just to confuse us all 😉
Here’s how you hide, or remove Facebook Recommendations from your Facebook Page step-by-step:
- Go to Settings on your Page
- Click Edit Page
- Scroll down until you find Reviews
- Choose the Settings option (to the right of recommendations)
- Turn Reviews off
- Click Save
If you want to re-enable the recommendations later, go back to the same location and turn them ON again. Having no recommendations visible on your Facebook Page isn’t entirely helpful. You could be missing out on a powerful opportunity to share the experiences of your customers and might not appear as an established, trustworthy business.
Turning off Facebook Reviews is a process that should not be taken lightly. It’s up to you to decide whether taking critical recommendations on the chin or keeping things calm until you have your business in order suits your situation better. No matter which route you take, it’s helpful to know how to shut Facebook Reviews down.
Get more reviews instead
One brilliant way to outnumber and move on from a genuine critical review is to boost the number of customer reviews you receive overall. A platform like HelpfulCrowd can help you build more user-generated content by collecting content-rich customer reviews. This will have the effect of pushing a critical reviews further down the list and boosting your overall rating (so long as your business provides a good level of service to your customers of course). You can also show these alongside your Facebook Recommendations on your website using the HelpfulCrowd widgets. Sign up for a free demo today.
