There has been a few questions and concerns about the sudden prominence of star ratings on Facebook business pages.

• Have now got a very prominent star rating at the top of your Facebook page?
• Are you wondering why you don’t have a star rating on your business page?
• Do you have a star rating, but it doesn’t seem accurate and want to get rid of it?

Here are some quick facts and tips to help you get your head around this (until Facebook changes it again!):

1 – If you choose to provide your address information and tick the box for “Show this map on your Page and enable check-ins”, you will see star ratings on your business page.

2 – If you choose not to provide details of a physical address and do not tick the box to show the map, you won’t.  (You can check your settings by clicking on the Edit Page button at the top of your page’s admin panel and then selecting Edit Page Info.  Scroll down to the address field to see what you have specified.)

3 – This star rating system is not new – it is part of the Reviews section that shows near the top of the right hand column on your facebook page

4 – What is new is that the stars now appear very prominently by your Facebook page name.  See this example for a lovely acupuncturist near Eastbourne.

5 – What is inconsistent and upsetting for a number of businesses, is that the star rating system doesn’t seem to accurately reflect their reviews (and conflicts with scores on other rating websites).  Some businesses find that their Facebook fans have all given 5 stars in their reviews, but the rating Facebook puts at the top of their page is 4.  So if you want to remove the stars you can, by unticking the box showing your address, but this is not ideal for a business that is attracting customers to its premises.

6 – You can try to increase your star rating by asking customers via email or social media etc. to leave a review – remember to say thanks!

7 – Facebook says that “Page admins cannot remove individual reviews from their Page.”… hopefully everyone will play fair and this will all work out well.

I hope that helps!  What do you think about the review system on Facebook?