How to Get Facebook Reviews

Nowadays, everybody has the ability to be a critic and get their opinion out there. Whether we’re talking about the pop-culture and entertainment industry, restaurants, or other service-oriented businesses, all of them can easily be graded, reviewed, and evaluated via social media. Facebook, in particular, has turned into a very reviewer-friendly platform. It encourages Facebook business pages to collect reviews and pushes its users to leave new reviews by asking them suggestive questions about their experience.

It is a part of the world’s biggest social media platform’s plan to collect even more data about its users, both the incorporated and individual ones. However, the Facebook reviews section doesn’t only benefit the Silicon Valley giant. Local businesses and their potential customers also stand to gain a lot from having positive opinions and recaps of people’s experiences on the business pages. The Facebook reviews tab is one of the most frequently targeted areas by digital marketing pros, for many reasons. For starters, online reviews are right up there alongside personal recommendations when it comes to the most persuasive ways of getting people to try out a restaurant, hairdresser’s salon, or any other type of local business.

If you run a local business and don’t really know how to get reviews on Facebook, you’re definitely in the right place! Read this article to find out what impact reviews can have on your day-to-day operations and profits. We’ve also added a simple step-by-step guide that will show you how to enable reviews on your business page in the first place!

What Businesses Benefit the Most from Facebook Reviews?

While collecting and analyzing reviews on Facebook is a worthwhile thing to do for any company, there definitely are certain types of businesses that stand to gain the most from encouraging customers to share their experiences on their Facebook page. Facebook reviews are mainly geared towards local, service-oriented establishments. A mom-and-pop fresh produce store. A small pizza joint surrounded by large commercial chains. A generations-old barbershop. These are exactly the kinds of businesses that should prioritize getting Facebook reviews as the key part of their social media marketing strategy.

Sure, remaining interactive with your customers is important, and the occasional blog post couldn’t hurt, either. However, it has been proven that Facebook business page reviews are one of the most surefire ways to quickly increase a local establishment’s revenue. Big corporations and well-known fast-food chains are not as reliant on positive reviews. You may have noticed that in fact, their Facebook reviews are overwhelmingly negative, and yet that does not impact their global revenue streams. This is because they’ve established their brands ages ago, and have enough resources to stay afloat for the decades to come.

People don’t go to McDonald’s because they feel like eating a burger. They go to McDonald’s because they feel like having McDonald’s! This is the main difference between a world-famous food chain, and a small, locally-owned diner or restaurant. In the case of the latter, people are willing to read through thousands of words of reviews, just to make sure that they end up at a place that serves the absolute best-tasting cuisine they feel like eating on that particular day. That’s why your business’s Facebook and Google reviews matter so much.

Is Your Facebook Business Page Correctly Optimized?

Before getting to the specifics of how to ask for reviews on Facebook, you should take a look at your business Facebook page and make sure that it’s up to all of the modern standards. A poorly optimized page won’t really encourage customers to give your business a shot, even with stellar reviews. While other people’s experiences are indeed the thing that can ultimately lock down a sale, the look and feel of your page also affect your online reputation, which is increasingly important in terms of bringing new, real-life customers to your front door. Below, you can find a short checklist of what you should take care of, social media-wise before you start collecting reviews.

• Profile and cover photos. While the graphical side of things on your Facebook business page is not as important as on platforms like Instagram, it is a key component of your Facebook marketing strategy, as well. Try to go for a design that reflects the spirit of your small business. If you run a restaurant, pictures of food are always a great pick for cover photos, although might not work as well for your profile picture.
• Adherence to Facebook’s guidelines. Regardless of whether you run your Facebook profile yourself, or have hired someone else to do it, you need to make sure that your posts don’t violate any of the social media platform’s wide set of rules and regulations. Getting banned, even temporarily (or shadowbanned, which is even worse) is something that will have a significant impact on the success of your establishment.
• Post frequently. Every single Facebook post generates some sort of engagement. Even if it’s hard to measure it with statistics, the things that you post have an effect on your customers’ perception of your small business. You should draft posting schedules on a monthly basis and stick by them. Prepare multiple posts in advance, and analyze what people respond well to, and what they don’t really care about. It may seem like it has nothing to do with the services you provide or the products you manufacture, but in fact, these little things online have a tremendous impact on the customer’s experience in real life, as they create positive associations between your company and fun online stuff they’ve seen before paying you a visit.
• Be responsive. When people text you on Messenger, try to respond as soon as possible. Ever since Facebook made business pages’ response rates public, it seems to have affected people’s perceptions of companies, even if they weren’t planning on messaging you. In the eyes of people looking for company recommendations on social media, an unresponsive business is a bad business. If you fail to respond to a question or criticism conveyed via a private message, it may even prompt a bad review!

How to Get People to Leave Reviews on Your Facebook Page

It takes a special type of person to continuously leave reviews of businesses, restaurants, and service providers on the Internet. That is not to say that these special people don’t exist. They definitely do, but they are also in the minority of Facebook users. More often than not, however, you’ll need to give your customers a little nudge to leave a positive review, in a way that it benefits both your business and the customers themselves.

If you’re clueless about how to encourage people to post Facebook reviews of your business, don’t worry. Most small business owners are at the very beginning. Below, you can find some handy ideas that will improve your review scores and volume.

Follow-Ups

This technique is often employed by owners of certain service providers, such as beauty parlors, SPAs, or hairdresser salons. Basically, it entails getting contact details from your clients and then following up on their visit with a brief message asking them about their experience with your business. Do keep in mind that depending on where you live, you may have to obtain written permission from them regarding your use of their personal information. There are quite a few ways of contacting your existing customers, with e-mail, text messages, and instant messaging apps being three of the most popular ones.

E-mail

While it’s probably the easiest way of sending a follow-up message, sending e-mails too frequently entails the risk of your follow-ups ending up in most people’s spam folders. Make sure to draft your messages so that they don’t sound too generic and promotional to decrease the chances of that happening.

Text

Texting is probably one of the best ways to follow up on a visit. With a personalized message sent to a customer soon after they’ve left your establishment, they are likely to click on the Facebook link to your business’s page and leave a five-star review.

Instant Messaging

Getting through to people via an app like Messenger may be difficult because texts from people outside of one’s Facebook friends tend to go unnoticed. However, it’s worth a shot as it may increase your responsiveness which will show directly on your business page.

Incentivize Facebook Check-ins

Including a little note encouraging someone to check in to your establishment via Facebook in your restaurant’s menu, or signs in the waiting room of your beauty parlor is a good way to engage them with your business in the digital sphere. Once they check in on Facebook, they’ll get an automatic message asking them to leave a review (or at least a star rating). A surefire way to get people to check-in is by offering them a small (5-10%) discount on the service once they do so.

Waiting Room Signs

If you run a beauty parlor, SPA, or barbershop, chances are that your customers will spend a fair share of their time waiting for the service. Putting up signs that encourage them to leave a review will give them something to do with that time, and leaving a note offering a discount for reviewing your business is highly effective at getting those five-star reviews on a regular basis.

Promote Great Facebook Reviews

Every now and then, your previous customers will leave well-written or humorous reviews of your business on your Facebook review page. It might be a good idea to use some of these reviews as part of your digital marketing strategy, as not only will it increase engagement, but also encourage new customers to give your establishment a try.

Directly Ask the Customers

It may seem a little old-fashioned, but directly asking people to leave Facebook reviews for your business is one of the surest ways to get them to visit your Facebook page and leave a high rating. If you run a restaurant, telling your waiters to inquire about the review as they collect payment from customers can make that process all the more efficient.

How to Enable Reviews on Your Facebook Business Page

Many small businesses struggle to get more customers to spend money with them via social media, without even noticing that they haven’t enabled reviews on their Facebook page! Thankfully, it’s a fairly straightforward ordeal, and if you haven’t done it yet, follow these five steps to quickly enable reviews for your business.

1. Log in to your business page.
2. Click “Settings”
3. Go to “Templates and Tabs”
4. Use the slider that says “enable reviews”
5. Click “Save”.

Voila! Now, your company’s Facebook page is ready to receive great reviews, and you’re free to use the incentivization strategies listed above to boost engagement with users!

Step Up Your Review Game with Weave’s New Review Management Tool!

Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, but it isn’t the only platform that allows people to leave reviews and possibly prompt future customers to do business with you. Weave Reviews allows you to simplify that part of your social media marketing strategy by aggregating customer reviews from all the portals you’re active on, and allows you to get a clearer picture of what you should do to strengthen your online presence and turn that presence into profits!