How did I not know about this?

Even though I’ve been on Facebook for about a squillion years – I was an early adopter – I’ve only just discovered the feature called ‘Reviews’. It has been around for years, but I’ve never used it before.

Then again, I’ve not really had a page apart from my personal profile until late-ish last year when I emerged onto the world stage as a budding poet with many important things to say.

As an author, the way I’ve learned to use Facebook is entirely different than the “look at me” and “look at my selfie” way I used to drive the social media bus. These days, I don’t want people to look at me. I want them to look at my work, discover my books, and tell their friends about them, too. I want to be read, not noticed.

That’s where Facebook reviews and ratings come into the picture.

Facebook reviews and ratings help by leading potential customers to trust your brand or products.

According to Review Trackers,  71% of people say they “somewhat” or “completely” trust what they read on Facebook. At the same time, 66% of consumers regularly share feedback, thoughts and opinions on their purchases using social media.
In short – if someone likes your work enough to leave a review or rating, that’s going to be an encouragement to other people to try it for themselves.

Reviews can also help by increasing your engagement with your audience.
If a new visitor sees that you’ve responded positively to your previous visitors, that will also encourage them to trust you and your products. The more you engage with your audience, the more likely they are to become return customers.

How to add the Reviews tab to your page:

1. Navigate to your page
2. Click on ‘Settings’ at the top right-hand side.

3. Click on ‘Edit page’.

4. Under Templates, scroll down to where it says ‘Add a Tab’.

5. Click on ‘Add a tab’.

6. Click ‘Add Tab’ on ‘Reviews’, then on the ‘Close’ button.

7. Rearrange your tabs by clicking on the icon that looks like three little lines next to the title of the tab and dragging up or down.

I have rearranged the tabs so that the Reviews tab is at the top, immediately under ‘About’ and above ‘Likes’ so that it’s always in a prominent place and easily seen by visitors to my page.

When you’ve completed these steps, visitors to your page will be invited to leave a review.

There is one catch.
If someone leaves a negative review, you can’t delete it. Only the reviewer can delete a review.

You can, however, report it and have it removed if you can show that it is not a fair review.
Having a bunch of positive reviews and interactions on your page is your best resource in that situation.

If it turns out that you don’t like the Reviews feature, or if it’s not working for you, you can simply disable the reviews by removing the Review tab, following a similar process to that used to add the tab in the first place.

Leaving Reviews.

Leaving a review is easy. You choose how many stars out of five, and leave a short comment. The minimum length is 40 characters.  It can be as simple as “Your book covers are fantastic. I love the colours and design.” This would work perfectly well as a positive review.
This means that helping a small business or Indie author/musician/whatever  by leaving a positive review could take as little as 30 seconds out of your day.

If you’ve read the book, heard the song, received a beautiful hand-made card or eaten a delicious meal at a restaurant, leaving a review is a great way to acknowledge the work that went into bringing you pleasure.

My Commitment.

I’m going to spend some time over the next weeks leaving reviews and ratings for the Facebook pages for authors and books I’ve been reading and appreciating lately.

I’m going to make this an ongoing thing. In conjunction with the reviews I write and post on Amazon, Goodreads and my Book Squirrel blog, I’m going to make a point of leaving a review on the author’s and/or the book’s Facebook page.

The Challenge:

It would be fantastic if you would do that for the writers and other Indies you know, too.

Not only will that brighten a writer’s day, it just might help them sell a book or two.