Do you have a Facebook page for your local business? If so, you can allow your customers to leave ratings and reviews for your business on your Facebook page. But what happens when someone leaves a negative review or comment? When it happens, it leaves business owners wondering how to delete these reviews on Facebook.
Can you delete/remove reviews on Facebook?
The fast answer is no, you can unfortunately not delete reviews or ratings simply because they are unfavorable for your business. One of the reasons networks like Facebook, Google, and Yelp allow users to leave reviews for businesses is to ultimately give them the chance to select the best business for their needs.
If networks like Facebook allowed business owners to delete or remove reviews, then every business would have nothing but glowing reviews. Customers would never get the chance to view the business objectively.
The only person who can delete a Facebook review is the reviewer themselves. Your chances of getting the reviewer to delete it is higher than your chances of getting Facebook to delete it.
What to Do When You Receive a Negative Review on Facebook
If you receive a negative review on Facebook, take a moment before you respond. Your response will be posted along with the negative review for all of your current fans, page visitors, and future customers to read.
When the reviewer has left a specific comment, acknowledge their concerns. Then consider the best way to handle the situation that meets your business’s standards of customer service.
In circumstances where you receive a low star rating without a comment, you can choose to leave it alone in hopes that better reviews with commentary will outrank it. Or, you can respond to the rating, asking the rater if there is anything you could help them with to make it a better experience.
Three Ways to “Remove” Negative Reviews from a Facebook Page
If responding to the negative rating or review is not enough, there are two alternative ways you can remove it from your Facebook page.
Report Reviews That Violate Facebook’s Guidelines
First, get to know Facebook Community Standards for creating a safe networking space. If the negative review violates guidelines (excessive cruelty, hate speech, or threats of violence), you can send the review to Facebook. Once Facebook examines the content of the negative review, they will notify you of their decision in your support inbox.
Compensate With More Positive Reviews
If that doesn’t work, you can work toward collecting more reviews for your Facebook page. As your page gets more positive reviews, they will slowly drown out the negative review or rating. In many cases, positive reviews will outrank the negative ones. Especially if you like the positive reviews, reply with a thank you, and encourage social engagement around them.
Turn Off Your Facebook Page’s Reviews
If you feel that the negative rating or review is hurting your business, your last option is to disable reviews on your Facebook page. This means that you lose the ability to display any positive reviews and ratings on your page and collect new reviews.
To do this, go to your Facebook page settings. Under the Templates and Tabs settings, turn the Reviews toggle off.
You can turn reviews on in the future, but the reviews you have received in the past will still be associated with your Facebook page. If you choose to turn reviews back on, do so when you are sure you can collect new, positive reviews about your business.
Alternatives to Facebook Page Reviews
Don’t miss out on customers who may skip your business if they can’t find reviews. Create a Ratings & Reviews or Testimonials page on your website and publish real reviews that you’ve hand-selected.
Start by emailing your customers a survey about their experience at your business. This should help you determine where your business needs to improve on providing the customer service needed to receive positive feedback from customers.
When customers send in comments that would make for a great review or testimonial, you can email them back (ask if that’s ok in the survey). See if they would share their comments on your website, on video, or on another review network like Google or Yelp.
To share your positive reviews and testimonials with Facebook fans, post them on your wall. Add stars and images to make it stand out on your page.
You can also share positive reviews from other platforms like Google and Yelp. In the following example, the business owner turned the review into a video to get it more attention in the news feed.
Other Ways to Manage Your Reputation on Facebook
Reviews aren’t the only way Facebook users can talk about your business. You can use the Facebook search box to find people who have made public posts on their Facebook profile, commented on other Facebook pages, or posted in public Facebook groups.
To help manage engagement, you can use MavSocial’s Social Inbox. It allows you to not only manage Facebook reviews, but Google My Business reviews too, and allows you to manage comments, mentions, posts, and messages across multiple social media account and networks in one, unified inbox.
You can use it to respond to your Facebook page reviews, both positive and negative. You can assign reviews and messages to members of your social media teams making it easy to take care of customer service issues in a smooth and timely manner.
In Conclusion
While you can’t delete or remove reviews on Facebook just because they are negative, you can use them. Instead of disabling reviews, use bad reviews to show fans and customers how much your business is willing to help turn a negative experience into a positive one.
