Facebook is beta testing its new reviews to recommendation feature to bring more value to customer feedback system and ease the review system itself. Earlier it planned to change the 1 to 5 rating system to 1-to 10. That means 10 is the highest rating that your business can get. However, it has suddenly taken a different approach altogether; in fact, now it is testing to convert the reviews to recommendations. That means customers can simply choose yes/no. it is a complete binary system.

The star ratings will be visible on the page for the rime being until the testing process gets over. However, as a business owner, you should be well aware of this current change. Let’s have an in depth analysis of the whole process and how it will impact your business.

Key aspects:

• Facebook will no more collect customer reviews and feed; in fact, it will ask for user recommendation instead
• Since the recommendation system is binary, business owners and the marketers need to focus more on the written texts to get insight
• The new feature rich-endorsement will allow users to upload the images of their experience that would accompany their recommendation
• This new feature will help in flagging the fake reviews easier

The new feature is not yet applied on the API that means, for now, Facebook will consider both past rating and reviews until it eliminates the old rating system, apparently, this can open up a new market for reputation management software to retrieve the lost data.

What about the rich endorsement:

Local business houses can take advantages of rich endorsement by asking their customers to upload photos along with texts. Although this feature is quite applicable for coffee joints, restaurant and eateries, in future other business houses can also use this feature. This particular feature is more or less like Google’s subjective and objective feature of My Business.

Now, this process can impact the business uniquely. For instance, some people might just skip the recommendation what otherwise would have been a lower rating of 2 or 3 had the five star rating continued. Here business houses are at the risk of receiving less number of ratings; however, given the simplicity of the system, one can also expect a substantial rise in the recommendation system.

In addition, now the brand managers will have to spend a little extra time in reading texts to understand and get insights into the true stories. That means, the qualitative analysis will be more effective than the quantitative analysis as the five-star rating goes out of the scene.

However, customers can still leave messages and suggestions on the page if they want or wish to and the five-star rating will be still shown on the page.

Image Source: Reputationloop.com

The authenticity of the recommendation:

Facebook also declared that reviews that are faked can be flagged under various tags like harassment, nudity, violence, drugs, and spam. Now, the time will tell the whole story how the review flagging system unfolds once the features are applied on API.

How can you take advantage?

As Facebook tests its new feature, you as a business owner can take advantage of this time because you can have the direct access to customer insight as Facebook lets all the keywords to be displayed on the page. For instance, any customer visiting your Facebook page will be able to see the keywords that are used for your business.

As the Facebook recommendations testing process is underway, you have the luxury of using the new layout to discover how your customers are feeling about your business and their experience. That means you can see the most used keywords that have been used to recommend for your business.

For instance, if you have not been on top of your marketing stats, now is the time to look at your rating. If your page is showing 4 out of 10 on the new rating scale although you have more than 90 % 4 to five-star rating, then be sure that you are lacking response time. That means your customers are happy but when it comes to digital communication, you are not doing good.

Critical analysis:

At this time, one might ask the sustainability of this system. When you leave a business at the mercy of simple yes and no, then the whole thing is gone for a toss because someone will either love your business or hate it and there is no middle path. And then, of course, you might also ask how both the five-star rating and 10 rating scale will help business.

Most of the business owners would not even be aware of this system until someone makes them understand the whole rating system; in addition, the ratings are sometimes different for different brands.

However, Facebook has not yet deployed these features because it has the tendency of testing everything before launching. Actually, it is hard to tell how the finality would unfold because Facebook does not let the outside world know about these changes. Only experienced social media managers can help you to understand the whole system. if you are someone who is new to this idea, then perhaps you need to find more information.

However, as mentioned above, you can log in to your Facebook account and use the layout to understand how this is working. Undoubtedly, it would not be too difficult to get the essence of Facebook recommendations. So, make sure that you approach it analytically and learn about the recommendation structure and reviews.

The new feature will be helpful in attracting reviews because it is simplified. Either you recommend or not. Now, this can be a time saver for a lot of users as they can simply finish the review process quickly. In addition, the business owners and marketers now have to dig deep into text and content to get the insight. In addition, they have to also promote rich endorsement feature too.

In a nutshell; only time can tell how this system will impact business across the platform and you should wait a bit more to find out the truth.

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