How To Remove Reviews From Facebook
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Negative Facebook reviews are a huge turnoff for potential customers. You can only imagine the consequences for your brand if it becomes a victim of review bombing, with trolls purposely posting bad feedback.
That’s why we’ve created this guide, where we’ll show you how to remove reviews from Facebook to preserve your online reputation.
What Are Facebook Reviews?
Facebook reviews are feedback that customers post on your business’s Facebook page. These reviews can just be ratings or ratings with recommendations.
Unlike many other social platforms, Facebook isn’t anonymous. These are real people posting real reviews. Good Facebook reviews indicate past customers have had a positive experience with your brand, likely influencing potential customers to do business with you.
The Basics of Removing Reviews From Facebook
Facebook for business is a blessing and a curse. With nearly 3 billion people using the platform, you get exposure like no other—but you’ll also find yourself dealing with inappropriate or unfair feedback.
Let’s take a look at how you can tackle this issue.
Understanding Whether a Review on Facebook Is Fake
Before we discuss deleting or removing Facebook reviews, you need to identify whether a customer review is fake in the first place.
For starters, it’s helpful to maintain a customer database and transactional records to cross-check a negative review from a customer. Does the negative review match or closely resemble an existing customer? Do you have a customer complaint on the file matching the events recounted in the review?
If it does, the review is genuine, and you should work on resolving it with tact. But if the review doesn’t align with any of your business records, it’s fake.
Here are a few common red flags to easily spot a fake Facebook review:
- The account has one of those typical fake names. Think: John Retartagan, Patty O’Furniture, Olive Yew
- The account is created on the same day as the day of the review—and for the sole purpose of giving your business a bad review
- The account profile picture is copied from somewhere else
- The account is connected to a competitor or a former employee
- The posted review has an inaccurate description of your business’s product or service is filled with silly grammatical errors or recommends your competitor in the complaint
Unfortunately, removing fake Facebook reviews isn’t as easy as you might hope.
Deleting Reviews From Facebook Isn’t Possible
Can you remove or delete Facebook reviews? No, you cannot delete a legitimate review on Facebook, however malicious.
This is because of Facebook’s policy to provide a reliable and transparent review system to its users. If it allowed businesses to tamper with reviews, people would lose their trust in Facebook and not see it as a reliable source of information.
But Facebook doesn’t extend the same courtesy to fake reviews made from shady and fake accounts. If the review is flagrant and/or in obvious violation of its community standards, Facebook will remove it.
In other cases, Facebook is unlikely to take down a Facebook recommendation. The scathing and unfair review will stay connected to your page unless you take a few remedial and preventive actions.
Reporting a Review on Facebook
If the Facebook review goes against Facebook‘s Community Standards, you can flag it. To do this, the review should either be clearly fake or contain one or more of the following prohibited forms of speech:
- Bullying
- Hate speech
- Misrepresentation
- Cruelness and insensitivity
Facebook‘s Community Standards are broad, but the platform is quick to remove a Facebook recommendation if it’s ingenuine or overly offensive.
You can report a review on Facebook by following these steps:
- Log into your Facebook business page.
- Click on the Reviews tab on the top menu bar. Go to the review you want to report.
- Click on the three dots on the top right hand of the review.
- Select Report post from the displayed options. A pop-up window will appear on your screen.
- Select the most appropriate description from the displayed list, and follow the prompts to finish the process.
After reporting a Facebook recommendation, all you can do is wait. Facebook will review your request, and if it finds the review goes against its Community Standards, it’ll remove the review forever.
Respond to Your Real Negative Facebook Reviews
If legitimate customers have left bad Facebook recommendations, you need to respond positively and promptly as part of customer service.
Start with an apology and address the matter at hand, followed by offering a viable solution moving forward. If you do this right, you can change your customer’s negative experience into a positive one. It’ll also show potential customers your company cares about its customers and is serious about helping them.
Keep the following in mind when you respond to:
- Be sympathetic and non-confrontational
- Try to respond to recommendations promptly
- Keep your response short, sweet, and concise
Here’s an example of how responding to negative reviews professionally and tactfully can work in your favor:
Make sure customers are happy with your suggestion and reassure all customers that if things go wrong, you’ve always got their back.
Turning Off or Disabling Facebook Reviews
If you feel a negative review is hurting your business—or don’t want to deal with the trouble of worrying about bad or fake reviews, you can take a more extreme measure: disable Facebook recommendations entirely.
To be clear, turning off the review section will hide all the recommendations left by past customers, both positive and negative. This also doesn’t give you a clean slate—you’ll see all reviews again upon enabling Facebook reviews in the future. Still, this is an excellent option if you have several fake reviews.
Here are the steps to disable reviews from Facebook:
- Open your business page, making sure you’re logged in as the page admin.
- Click on Settings at the top right of the page.
- Navigate to the left-hand side of the page, and select Templates and Tab from the menu.
- Scroll down to Reviews, and click on Settings.
- To the right of the Show Reviews option, you’ll see a slider. Click on it to disable it.
- Select Save to confirm your new settings.
Now, customers can no longer see any negative feedback on your business’s Facebook page.
3 Tools to Remove Reviews From Facebook
Managing your online reputation is important, regardless of your business size and industry. Below, we’ve put together a list of three amazing online reputation management companies that can help you manage negative reviews on Facebook.
WebiMax
WebiMax is an excellent online reputation management company that offers hands-on review management solutions.
You can rely on it to bury negative feedback on Facebook and to create a positive image for your brand without breaking the bank. WebiMax uses a combination of soliciting more overall reviews—most of which should be positive if your business is succeeding—and muting the impact of negative reviews on Facebook. WebiMax also helps with other review sites like Google, Yelp, and Amazon.
Besides reputation management, WebiMax also offers review acquisition, social media marketing, and public relations services. It even can help you generate more sales leads and market to your local customers. If you need an updated website that’s easier to use for your customers, WebiMax is able to provide this service.
The company assigns you dedicated campaign managers who create custom strategies to suit your needs. One of WebiMax’s best features is that you can really customize your services. Every business is different, and WebiMax’s versatile and customized approach takes those differences into account.
Plus, the whole process is covered under a non-disclosure agreement. No one else will know you’re using a third-party service to repair your online reputation. This can be extremely important, as customers may be skeptical about your business if it becomes obvious you are using a reputation management provider.
BirdEye
BirdEye offers a wide range of reputation management solutions, but it’s the integrations with Facebook and Google that set it apart.
With BirdEye, you can auto-send review requests, respond to customer reviews on Facebook and other sites, and gather actionable insights with Natural language Processing (NLP). Review monitoring and management, review generation, and review marketing are the other desirable features.
You can also build a custom profile that can be beneficial to generate awareness and get more customers to check out your products and services. The fact that all these services are available on a single platform makes things even more convenient.
NetReputation
From removing negative comments from Facebook to improving brand visibility, NetReputation is one of the most comprehensive online reputation management companies.
It offers a full range of services, including reputation monitoring, review management, public relations, branding, and content removal. We also like how professional and responsive the company’s customer support is. To provide the best possible customer service, NetReputation thoroughly interviews business owners to understand their needs.
If you’re feeling the heat from poor Facebook reviews, you can always turn to NetReputation to help you clean up and achieve a shining reputation.
3 Tricks for Removing Reviews from Facebook
The following tricks and best practices will help you take control of your Facebook reviews:
Manage Your Emotions
Fake reviews can be upsetting. But don’t let your emotions get the best of you. This type of behavior does not solve your problem—and it may put your brand in a negative light.
Have trust in your business. Work on offering high-quality products and services that consistently yield positive reviews. Don’t lower your ethical standards just because somebody else decides to play dirty.
Get More Positive Reviews
Positive reviews are the best way to offset fake reviews and negative comments.
Reach out to customers who have positive experiences with your brand, and politely ask them to drop in a good word on your Facebook page. You can also offer them incentives like exclusive discounts or free goodies to make them more likely to turn the odds in your favor.
Hire a Reputation Management Service
Take control of your Facebook reviews and protect your online reputation by working with a reliable reputation management company.
A reputation management company can build an effective online reputation management strategy for your business. These services can help remove fake Facebook reviews by overcoming roadblocks in Facebook‘s reporting process—and if they can’t, the service can suppress fake reviews effectively to hide them from prospective customers.
Removing Facebook Reviews: Your Top Questions Answered
What to Do Next
Now that you know how to remove reviews from Facebook, it’s time to focus on building a sound social media marketing strategy.
Admittedly, social media marketing isn’t easy. You have to spend time learning how to do it right. Luckily, there are a few strategies and techniques to make data-based decisions, steering your business towards success. When done properly, you can get more traffic for your business, score more positive reviews, and improve conversion rates.
Here are a few Quick Sprout guides to help you get started on the right track:
- How to Effectively Market Your Small Business on Social Media
- The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing
- The Beginner’s Guide to the Best Strategies to Manage Your Online Reputation
- 16 Best Social Media Management Tools