Facebook’s Folly: Reviews

For reasons I haven’t been able to guess, Facebook seems to be growing more and more interested in soliciting reviews for business pages. At first, the addition of the Reviews box elicited nothing but a shrug of my shoulders. A handful of people posted reviews on the healthcare page I manage, most of them very positive.

Then a very frustrated patient posted a scathing review.

That’s certainly not good, but the situation was made far worse by the fact that Facebook does not notify page managers when a review is posted. As a social media soloist who relies on notifications heavily, I didn’t see the complaint until the next day – long after the patient had been discharged from her visit to the emergency department.

That morning I started researching ways to remove the Reviews box from our page.

I want to make it absolutely clear: I have no issue whatsoever with any feedback posted to our Facebook page (as long as it doesn’t violate our comment policy, but that’s another story). The reason I’ve removed the box is the lack of notification – period.

We did take some minor flak for disabling the function (from the patient who posted the negative review), but

1.  That criticism was posted to our wall, so I got a notification(!!)
2. It also gave me the opportunity to explain my motivation, not only to the patient, but to anyone else who may have been looking for the Reviews box.

Several months passed in Reviews-free bliss… and then, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, without warning, the box was back.

Once again I turned to Google for help, and discovered the  only way to keep the Reviews box disabled was to remove our street address completely. Lovely.

Still, as with most Facebook-related issues, I didn’t have much of a choice. It’s either remove the address or check the Facebook page compulsively 24/7 on the off chance someone is having a problem and has posted a review. My husband I can’t live like that.

I did add the hospital’s street address to the About field, but I’m left to wonder – is this a trend? What will I have to remove from the page next?

Facebook could fix this with a simple notification, but will they?

Update: I’m told Facebook is now offering notifications for reviews (as of March 2014). I’ve changed jobs since my original post and I’m no longer a social media department of one, but my new employer has also disabled the reviews  function — and we don’t plan to reactivate it anytime soon.

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