As if Yelp doesn’t give businesses enough to worry about, Facebook is rolling out star ratings for businesses. According to TechCrunch, “Screenshots and live testing show that Facebook has turned on the star rating display for at least a small subsection of users, providing information to network users that goes beyond the somewhat sentiment-deprived basic Like.”
Readers can assign a rating from one to five stars, but not necessarily comment, which could encourage drive-by ratings. At least with Yelp you can read through the comments and sort out the chaff, but on Facebook there is no way to figure out what triggered a positive or negative rating. Ugh. On the other hand, if they were to mandate comments as Yelp does, at least real names would show up.
It is going to be interesting to see how this ends up.
Ben Waterhouse says
Another sign of Facebook’s willingness to totally screw business page users. First they forced us to pony up cash if we wanted more than 10 percent of our followers to see a post, and now they’re going to force us to have a rating? It’s like they’re trying to drive businesses to Google+.
bubblegum casting says
Agreed not cool!
Chris Angelus says
You can disable the star ratings if you go to settings and remove your address from your page. The downside to this is no one can check in.
Lovely.
Customer Feedback Management says
What sucks right now is that Facebook does not allow the Page owner to see all of the reviews and allow them to reply. Currently only reviews posted Public are visible to the business owner. And the only way to reply to a review is to be friends with the reviewer. I hope FB changes this soon to allow a communication process to be set up between business owner and reviewer so that problems can be resolved,