Facebook is an important tool for law firms when it comes to online marketing strategies. With an optimized Facebook presence, you can connect with your community, keep people up to date on your business, drive traffic to your website, and spotlight why potential clients should choose you over competitors. Facebook’s review feature can play a role in this.
Facebook gives users two options for describing their experience with a local business. A “rating” is a simple one-to-five star rating. A “review” contains a star rating as well as a written statement.
Positive reviews left by former clients can encourage new clients. Facebook displays your Ratings (on a 5-star scale) near the top of your business page. The closer your score is to 5, the more reputable and trustworthy your business appears.
Of course, being an open platform, not all reviews will be positive, regardless of your businesses performance. This brings up the question, “What do I do about negative reviews?”
What About Negative Reviews?
First and foremost, don’t panic. A negative review or rating, no matter how scathing, will not likely be the end of your business.
When it comes to handling negative reviews and ratings on your Facebook business page, you have a few options.
As with most review features, individual reviews cannot be deleted. However, you can click “I don’t like this review” from a drop down menu in the upper right corner of the review post. If the review appears to be spam or without merit, Facebook may remove it. Unfortunately, if the person only leaves a rating without a written review, you do not have these options.
If Facebook does not remove the review, you have the option of hiding all reviews on the page. This can be done by going into your Page Info section of your page settings. Next click on Address, then uncheck the box labeled “Show map, check-ins and star ratings on the Page.”
As you would expect this also hides the map that displays your office location, number of people that have checked-in at your office and star rating from everyone who visits your page. This method is not usually recommended as it also hides a number of positive aspects of your business page and prevents users from leaving new reviews, even positive ones.
You can reach out to the reviewers by commenting on their review post. If it is possible to address their review in a friendly manner, they may remove their review or even change it to a positive review.
Disabling reviews on a page is now found in the settings menu. On a desktop, navigate to your business page and click “Settings” in the top right. In the “General” section, click on “Reviews” and then click “Disable.” Next, click “Save Changes.” Visitors will no longer be able to review your page and existing reviews will be hidden. You can enable reviews again at any time, which will result in previous reviews again being visible. Reviews play an important role in Facebook’s Professional Services feature, making it more important to seek positive reviews for your business page.
Focusing on the Positive
Another effective way to deal with negative reviews is to actively seek out more positive reviews (you are already doing this anyway, right?). Positive reviews decrease the weight of negative reviews. Having a few 1 star ratings doesn’t lock your page out of having a high rating overall.
It is also worth noting that on your page, Facebook only innately displays the “most helpful” reviews. These are the reviews with the most interaction. If your 5-star reviews have the most interactions, Facebook will display those ahead of the negative reviews.
In short, all business pages will likely receive a negative review at some point, often regardless of your businesses performance. Knowing how to handle a negative review can make all the difference.
We invite you to download our client reviews bundle that will help you focus on getting reviews from your clients.
