Businesses relied heavily on word-of-mouth marketing before the days of Twitter and Facebook. But rather than replace personal recommendations, the global adoption of social media has made word-of-mouth marketing much more prevalent and actionable for businesses. Today, marketers can monitor, measure, and interact with consumer recommendations. And with more than 1.3 billion members, Facebook is now home to a wealth of data around customers and businesses.
Although members could post about businesses for quite some time, the social network only began allowing members to officially rate them on a five-star scale back in early 2012. At the time, however, those ratings weren’t prominently displayed, making it difficult for businesses leverage positive online reviews. But in November 2013, Facebook put the ratings front and center on Facebook Pages, making them a very important element of your Facebook presence.
While there are obvious benefits to having your rating and reviews prominently displayed on your Page, some admins have found that the feature makes it more difficult for them to effectively manage their presence. Here’s more information about Facebook’s Rating and Reviews feature to help you determine if it’s right for your business.
How Ratings and Reviews Can Help
Many marketers rely on Facebook Likes as a way to gauge interest in and happiness with their business. But while Likes are a popular metric to track, they’re quite ambiguous in nature. The number of Likes something has can indicate a popular mindset, but not necessarily sentiment. And while comments help to paint a clearer picture, not everyone leaves them, and more importantly, they’re not as easy or fast to digest as a visual rating.
Star ratings not only make it easier for people to discover great businesses, but the feature also encourages more people to rate businesses on the social network. Those posts are then eligible …read more
Source:: Sprout Social