We’ve had some questions lately at Be Sociable about the starred review section on facebook business pages. 

First of all – it is an excellent feature. The starred review section allows people to give your business a rating of 1 – 5 based on their experience, as well as an option to add a written comment.

Obviously it is also important to make sure that your page type is correct. The starred review feature only works on physical entities, which means pages that are set up as “local businesses” or “companies and organisations”.

Why is this excellent? Think TripAdvisor. Your ratings give people who is not yet familiar with your product/service the opportunity to – at a glance – get an idea of what other people think of your business. Obviously if you have a good business with good customer relations, your ratings will be positive. If not, your ratings will plummet.

At the moment the starred review section only seems available to businesses with a physical address – to those businesses who only have a website, the option doesn’t yet seem available.

The process seems fairly easy, according to directions found in the Facebook Desk Help section :

• Just visit the Facebook page of the business you want to review.
• Scroll down to the review section on the right hand side of the timeline.
• Fill in the number of stars (total of five) that reflect your experience with the business.
• Fill in a written review as well in the space that asks “What do you think about this place?”
• You can mark your review public or select the friends, acquaintances or other connections you want to be able to see it.
• Then hit “Review” and you’re done.

Page owners be careful. You automatically enable the Facebook starred review feature by adding your physical address on Facebook. Facebook warns you cannot remove individual reviews. So the only option is to remove the review function completely by taking your address off your page.

How Facebook Starred Reviews are Different

Of course it’s impossible to think about the new Facebook review feature without considering all the controversy now surrounding online reviews.

According to Joshua Sophy, in September, small businesses in New York state faced $350,000 in fines after the attorney general’s office said they had hired freelancers to write fake online reviews.

Facebook allows only those with an account to write a review. But how many fake Facebook accounts are out there is anyone’s guess. At best, the new Facebook starred reviews feature should probably be viewed as another way to collect feedback and generate social interest rather than an objective measure of customer sentiment.