In this week’s video, we share all the details about Facebook’s new recommendation system, which recently replaced the traditional 5 star ratings system. The system is drastically different, and could have a huge impact on your dealership – you don’t want to miss all the info! VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car. This week, we’re talking about reviews again, because Facebook has made a huge change to the way reviews work…

If you haven’t heard, Facebook just got rid of star reviews. Instead of a 1 to 5 star rating, your customers now leave “recommendations” – here’s what it looks like:

OK, gotta cut in here – after we shot this video, I was all “woah, I said “recommendation” like a bajillion times – so just to poke fun at the fact that I said it more than an human in the history of ever, we’re gonna add a little count in on the bottom left corner – and we’ll set it at 2, cause that’s how many we’ve got already.

Instead of clicking to leave a review, they select either “yes” or “no” as their recommendation, and then it pops up a box where they can type out what they either like or don’t like about you. The response has to be at least 25 characters long, so they’re forced to leave a reason for the recommendation.

What’s really crazy is that they can leave a recommendation for you without even going to your dealership’s Facebook page! If they’re leaving a recommendation in their standard Facebook feed, either on their own, or as a response to a friend, that recommendation can show up on your page! As long as they tag your dealership in the recommendation and have it set to share publicly, it “counts” toward your dealership.

Your old reviews are still there – and they still count towards your review score. But, you can’t filter by best or worst reviews anymore, you can only sort by “most helpful” or “most recent”

What’s really cool is that any recommendations made by a user’s friends will be auto-sorted to show at the top of the list – so instead of random reviews from strangers, people will see what their own friends have to say about your dealership.

That’s really powerful, and could really help your dealership look even better if your customers’ friends are checking out your dealership on Facebook.

There are still a ton of questions about this new system – If they’ve switched to a binary system, why does it still show a 5 star scoring system? How do the new reviews play into that score? Is a “yes” recommendation a 5, and a “no” recommendation a 1?

Stay tuned, as we find out more about how the new recommendation system works, we’ll come back with updates in future videos to keep you in the loop.

Also keep in mind – if you’re using any sort of reputation management system or software, everything is currently broken, since the systems are set to look for a star score on reviews, not a yes/no recommendation. The providers are all updating their systems, though, so things should be working shortly.

So that’s it for this week’s Wednesday Workshop. As always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week with another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

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Greg Gifford is the Vice President of Search at Happy Hao Car. He has over 16 years of online marketing and web design experience, and has specialized in automotive SEO for the last 8 years, helping hundreds of auto dealers thrive while the industry has struggled during the recession. Greg speaks internationally at both automotive and SEO conferences, teaching thousands of small business owners and marketers how to get their sites to show up higher in local search rankings. Greg also spends his spare time doing freelance website design and SEO for local businesses. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.

Join the discussion 5 Comments

• tammy says: September 14, 2018 at 1:20 pm Thanks for sending these. Very helpful. Reply
• Annette says: October 8, 2018 at 8:23 pm Thank you for sharing. It’s nice to know all the details haven’t been released yet. I can stop searching for the moment. Thanks. Reply
• Mobeen Maqbool says: November 29, 2018 at 6:07 am Really helpful thanks Reply
• Brenda says: May 17, 2020 at 5:08 pm Question:. If a business removes the review button, how do they reactivate the review button to be displayed again. Also, when they recativate the review button are the reviews from the past still there. I’m assuming they are and if so is there a process to bring them up. Thank you. Reply Kelcey Drapp says: June 2, 2020 at 5:57 pm Hi Brenda, you should be able to reactivate your reviews/recommendations in page settings (directions here: https://www.facebook.com/help/548274415377576 ). All previous reviews/recommendations will be displayed. Reply

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