Facebook’s big changes. What does it mean for business owners?

With Facebook's August 6th “recommendations” announcement, prior reviews will be converted to recommendations, and will continue to be factored into the overall start rating of the page. Instead of a customer giving a star rating, there is now the question: “Do you recommend this business?” with a yes or no option. You can then add a written review, photos, and tag specific things to recommend. A lot of these changes look similar to Google My Business listings, and Google’s Contributions system.

Tip: Do not turn off the Recommendations feature. Turning this feature off for your business will hide current reviews and weakens your rankings and overall SEO.

Remember: what’s important that some people forget is -if you're talking about Facebook reviews, you’re not just talking about Facebook, you’re talking about Google local results as well because Facebook is one of several sources that Google will highlight in its knowledge panels with review information.

Facebook is incorporating recommendations more throughout their site. The traditional newsfeed is now replaced with the new recommendations and reviews section. They are making this section very prominent and easily accessible to consumers. A big reason for the change is that consumers are typically looking for this information, so they want to surface that and give it some priority.