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Facebook: Stars are Fading; Words Exploding

If your business has a Facebook page, take note. Facebook announced on August 6, 2018 that they were eliminating the 5-star business rating system in favor of Yes or No recommendations. This means that visitors to your Facebook page no longer have the ability to rate your business on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Instead, visitors will be simply asked if they would recommend your business with a Yes or No answer.

 

Expanding on Yes and No Recommendations

The good news is that regardless of their answer, visitors will be prompted to expand on their recommendation. For example, they can add rich endorsements or detailed comments about their overall experiences with your products, employees, online or in-store interaction, etc., to back up their answer. They can even add photos – positive or negative – to strengthen their recommendation.

Smart businesses will review each of these responses in-depth in order to make changes that can improve their customer experiences.

 

Don’t Search for the Stars; Reach for the Recommendations

Even though most of us have grown to love the 5-star rating option, it’s time to embrace this new system. Facebook will be highlighting these customer recommendations on the front page of your business’ Facebook page. This will allow new visitors to your site to gain honest feedback from your actual customers. As you know, people trust online reviews to help them make the decision whether or not to spend their hard-earned money with your business. Therefore, it is in your business’ best interest to ensure you get as many Yes recommendations as possible – and respond to the No recommendations as quickly as possible.

This merits repeating: Smart businesses will review each of these responses in-depth in order to make changes that can improve their customer experiences.

 

Ratings Won’t Go Away Entirely

Facebook won’t completely disregard the past 5-star ratings you’ve received in the past. Businesses will still be rated by Facebook by combining the past star ratings with the new Yes and No recommendations in order to formulate an overall rating for your business.

 

Smart and Easy Way to Monitor Your Recommendations

Fast Track Marketing has developed a Reputation Ramp Up program to not only help businesses monitor their online reviews and recommendations but also boost the amount of positive feedback and respond to negative comments. The service includes:

  • Review Monitoring & Management. We monitor 200+ social media sites, including Facebook, and provide timely responses to all reviews.
  • Review Marketing. In order to boost your search engine optimization (SEO), we will auto-post the best reviews to your website, custom review microsite and social media pages.
  • Review Generation. We have robust software programs to help your business generate new reviews through automatic emails and text messages. This also allows you to identify if someone is going to write a positive or negative review before sending them to a top review site. The sooner you can flag negative feedback and respond to it, the better chance you will have at stopping these words from ever landing online.

The marketing experts at Fast Track Marketing can take over the time-consuming but very important job of online reputation management. By partnering with our team, you will also be kept up to date on the ever-dynamic world of online reviews, SEO management and other technology changes that can affect your lead flow. To learn more about our services, contact Fast Track Marketing’s Director of Business Development, Brandi Musgrave, at (303) 731-2634 or brandi@fast-trackmarketing.com today.