Facebook Reviews Tab for Businesses Going Away
One of my daughters marches in her High School marching band and they’ve enjoyed several years of success in competitions. We really enjoy watching the band and always like the sections where the entire band lines up near the front of the field, closest to the stands. When they do this, the sound is at its loudest and it is usually the high point of the show. My wife, herself a marching band veteran, calls this ‘the company front.’ You can see the entire band at a pass and it is always at its most impressive.
What do marching bands and Facebook business fan pages have in common?
Facebook realizes that social media networks have a mission to make the user experience as good as possible. With its new timeline profile – hopefully a precursor to the next version of business pages – Facebook has put all of the relevant information on one screen and made it easy to scan through a wide variety of posts and content.
One early casualty in this process: the reviews tab.
Today, Facebook activated a header message with this content:
We’ve found that the best way to encourage conversation and feedback is through posts and comments on your Wall. We’ve removed these tabs for now as we work on tools to help you moderate and filter content. Our goal is to help you can manage everything from one powerful place. Stay tuned.
On place pages with a location, fans can still write a recommendation for their friends or others from the right-column that says Recommendations.
Is this good for business?
Yes. This means companies can now embed reviews as a visible part of what social media experts are calling ‘curated content.’ Rather than tucking them in a sidebar or separate page, they are now sprinkled in with the normal content stream. Because you can now add and remove posts and make some items more visible than before, you will have an increasing ability to leverage your reviews.
Reviews count, too. We are in the age of the expert opinion, and more than anything you can say, your customers are influenced by what your customers say about you.
You’ll have until Oct 31, 2011 to copy down your reviews from your business review tab. Keep them; you’ll want to repost them on your upcoming business timeline!