Can negative reviews be deleted?
Are you searching for a way to delete a bad Facebook review on your business page?
It is very frustrating when you receive a negative Facebook review which you feel is unfair.
Although deleting them may seem like the ideal scenario, unfortunately you can’t delete a bad Facebook review without switching off the reviews function completely.
(We wouldn’t recommend turning this off – you should have reviews on your Facebook business page).
What can you do about a bad Facebook review?
There are a number of actions you can implement to help address the situation. Here’s four top tips:
1 Carefully respond to the review so it is clear what happened (without going into great detail). Apologise. Explain how you responded at the time to try and help – this will greatly improve peoples’ perceptions.
With positive or negative feedback, it’s always best practice to respond to every review.
2 Try to get more genuine reviews asap. This will help to help “drown out” the bad Facebook review. Ask existing clients to write reviews about their positive experiences.
You may already do this in some form, but why not check your team are mentioning this at the appropriate time when they interact with clients?
Could your email newsletter remind clients to leave reviews too? Give them a link to your Facebook page and mention Google reviews too – they will all positively contribute towards your SEO ranking (position in search engine results).
3 Ask as many people as possible/as appropriate to mark the negative review on Facebook as unfair. This information is reported back to Facebook.
Perhaps you could explain the situation to your team and ask them to help?
They will need to go to login to their Facebook account and navigate to the specific review on your business page. They will then need to:
- click on the ‘!’ (circled below) and then click on the relevant comment (such as ‘unfair recommendation’)…. and send. Facebook may even delete the bad Facebook review if there are enough comments – but that is not guaranteed.
- if you can’t see the ‘!’, try clicking on the three dots in the top right hand corner of the review and click on ‘Give feedback on this recommendation’ to get to the same place. (The terms Reviews and Recommendations are both used by Facebook at the moment.)
4 Once you send this review you will see a screen saying ‘Thanks for letting us know.’
It also goes on to give you additional steps you can take. This includes messaging the person that left the review to ask them to take it down – the reviewer themselves can delete their comments.
You never know they may have calmed down and oblige with alterations or a deletion.
Statistics – online reviews matter
Forbes released these statistics which highlight the importance of managing your online reviews and how much your potential clients can be swayed by them:
- 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business. (2016)
- Online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions. (2015)
- 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. (2016)
- 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. (2016)
Do you manage your online reviews? Do you feel like it makes a difference to your business? We’d love to hear!
More free marketing advice:
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