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Online Reputation is for Lovers: Featuring Facebook

If you’re looking for the most online review love, head to Facebook.

 

According to a WebPunch study, Facebook garners 38% of business reviews, a close second to Google’s 41%. Of those reviews, 92.1% of them are four or five-star ratings—that’s some love.

(Compare all the online review platforms and see which ones get more positive reviews than negative in our 2017 State of Online Reviews, published last month.)

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People spend a lot of time on the social media monster. An article in Business Insider claims that Facebook’s 1.44 billion active users spent an average of 20 minutes every day on the site in 2015. In late 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed consumers spent upwards of 40 minutes a day on the site. Another article from the BizJournal says people checked Facebook nearly 14 times a day in 2013.

In other words, people use Facebook; it’s kind of a big deal. And people are using it to leave businesses reviews and feedback as well as research a business. In fact, through another WebPunch study, we found that about 21% of consumers use Facebook as a means to research a business. (One drawback we’ve found, however, is that Facebook reviews do not appear on Google search results as Yelp reviews do. We’re holding out for the best.)

 

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One of the best parts about Facebook is the endless chatter on the site. If a user posts a review about you on your business’s profile page, it will show up on their friend’s newsfeed for them to see. Then they can like and comment on the review and even click on it to get a closer look at your business.

And the more someone clicks on a page, the more often it comes up in a user’s Facebook world. Your recent Facebook posts may appear in your audience’s news feed or your profile picture could line the sides of their Facebook page, enticing them to click. Get people interested in you. Get people clicking on your posts and then Facebook algorithms will keep spreading the love.

How do you get people clicking? It’s largely done by having an active Facebook page. Respond to comments and reviews and regularly post fresh insights, product information, company news, or an entertaining or inspiring quote or graphic for your audience.

Ongoing campaigns and regular giveaways are great tools to incorporate into your Facebook strategy as well.

For example, to celebrate National Women’s Small Business Month last October, we published small, yet in-depth interviews with successful businesswomen every week. We tagged the interviewee and their company and gave it the appropriate hashtags. It resulted in a chain of shares by our audience and theirs, as well as a slew of comments and likes. Not only that, we got the opportunity to talk about something that is important to us: women in business.

Sometimes, we’ll offer a five-dollar Starbucks gift card, a free pint of ice cream, or some other surprise in exchange for signing up for our newsletter, sending us a story about a unique business transaction, or just to celebrate a holiday, like National Ice Cream Day.

We talk about how and when to incorporate Facebook into your business’s overall online review strategy here.

Don’t forget, there’s the “About” section on every Facebook profile where you can describe your business using as many or as few details as you’d like. There are also fields for business listing information like address and phone number and website. You can post profile pictures that viewers will see as soon as they visit your Facebook page, capturing their attention and bringing them in.

Get in on that Facebook Love. Only 7% of Facebook reviews are one or two stars; the rest are four and five-star reviews. It’s also an important research tool for consumers and offers communication capability for businesses. The key is to get them to your page and get them clicking so they can spread the love.