The one to five star rating system, for business and product ratings/testimonials, is very common throughout several review platforms on the internet. Ratings are also used by some very common standards such as JSON-LD, RDFA and Microdata used to render Rich Snippets for reviews and their ratings. Facebook, however, is moving away from the five star rating to a recommendations system on a Recommended VS Not Recommended choice.
What does this mean for your business page?
The social network is hoping this change will push people to write more extensively about their experiences, which will lead to more authentic, richer reviews. This change is rather unexpected and will ask users to simply recommend or not your business. However, it does not appear to force users to write a much longer explanation of the reason behind your recommendation.
Also old five stars based ratings are being left behind for the older reviews, thus leaving a bit of an inconsistent feel about the business page where some ratings are visible alongside the new recommendations.
How will the Facebook recommendation be displayed on MyReviews?
MyReviews will be converting the new recommendations to show positive ones as five star ratings and negative ones as one star ones. The main reason behind this is consistency across all reviews systems but also it is done to be compliant with all the Rich Snippets systems so that your website reviews can be leveraged for SEO purposes and achieve a great SERP result and display of relevant information on your site.
We will soon be rolling out a Rich Snippet solution for all our premium sites. Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions about the above.
