UPDATE, AUGUST 24, 2018: Facebook is in the process of changing from “reviews” to “recommendations,” so numbers and other reporting may be off. For more information about this change, I highly recommend Aaron Weiche’s explainer article on GetFiveStars.com.
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I keep hoping Facebook would just fix this problem and let me off the hook for having to blog about it, but after two weeks or so, it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen.
It was a couple weeks ago when I noticed that all of the reviews had gone missing from my wife’s Facebook Page. As I recall, she had about 10 glowing reviews on her Page with an overall 4.9 star rating. When I’d try to visit the dedicated sub-page for Reviews, Facebook would show this “content isn’t available” message:
Not only had the reviews gone missing, but the Reviews tab disappeared from her Page’s navigation and there was no option in Settings to return that tab.
There’s never a good time for this kind of thing to happen, but in our case the reviews disappeared right as we were ready to start a steady campaign to increase her review profile across the web. She’s using a new customer management platform and we’d created a handful of stock emails that would be sent out to past clients to invite them to leave reviews on several different sites — Facebook included. And given Facebook’s ubiquity, that seems to be the platform where we’d find the least resistance to posting a review. Everyone is on Facebook, after all!
Facebook seems to know about the problem. There are numerous threads about the missing reviews in the Page help forums; here’s one where the original post is two years old, but there’s been a flurry of “it’s happening again” posts in the past couple weeks. There’s a similar thread in the Facebook developers’ forum where at least one Facebook employee has posted — with a bit of frustration, it seems — that the board is for developer issues, not Page owners’ issues.
What’s odd is that the problem isn’t consistent across desktop and mobile. On desktop, I see nothing — no reviews, no Reviews tab, etc., as described above. But on mobile, her Page shows the Reviews tab and has the shell of the reviews … but each post is completely empty, as you see here:
At this point, I’m beyond frustrated. Word-of-mouth marketing is bread and butter for real estate agents and Facebook is an incredibly important visibility platform. I’ve used the “Report a Problem” option that shows up when you click the little question mark in the upper right of Facebook’s nav menu. Hopefully many other Page owners are doing the same. And hopefully Facebook will listen and fix this sooner rather than later.
Page owners: Are your reviews also missing? Is it the same on desktop and mobile? Very curious to know what others are seeing. Please comment below.
Update:
As of today (Monday, October 30), I’m seeing the reviews again on my wife’s Facebook Page. The tab is there, content is there, etc. Hallelujah!
Hi Katie! I have two answers for you - the official Facebook answer and what we're hearing behind closed doorshillardkatie1 said:
Hi there - I've noticed on some of our location pages have their recommendations and ratings removed. This is what FB support responded back with (see below). It looks like all recommendations and ratings are going to be removed in the future with no certain timeline (reviews will stay). Thought I would share and see if anyone else is noticing this on their end as well.
Note from FB support:
I have gotten word back from our team. It looks like this is happening to a bunch of Pages in preparation of removing the Recommendation system like I was mentioning. Our team is working on a replacement system but they do no have any time frame when that will be released. Expect the Recommendation and the ratings to section of the review tab to be completely remove in the near future. The reviews will stay but the Recommendation and the ratings will be removed.Click to expand...
Officially, Facebook has always maintained that they do not have to always show all reviews or recommendations. My guess for this is due to my unofficial response below. They do appear to be making a large change to the review/rating system again as they remove page likes from pages. Unfortunately, it is hard to hold them to much because they're making so many changes so quickly. If you have someone that can check for you from another device, are they seeing the same reviews you are or do they see different content?
UN-officially, I'm hearing that they've got an unidentified bug that is causing this and they have not yet been able to figure out how or why it is happening -if this is the case, I expect it will be resolved relatively quickly but with little information on how or why, so prepare for frustration.
Are they removing the reviews tab from pages altogether? If so, how will "reviews stay?" I mean, I can see them on the page link forward slash reviews for our page, but no one knows to navigate to that.hillardkatie1 said:
Hi there - I've noticed on some of our location pages have their recommendations and ratings removed. This is what FB support responded back with (see below). It looks like all recommendations and ratings are going to be removed in the future with no certain timeline (reviews will stay). Thought I would share and see if anyone else is noticing this on their end as well.
Note from FB support:
I have gotten word back from our team. It looks like this is happening to a bunch of Pages in preparation of removing the Recommendation system like I was mentioning. Our team is working on a replacement system but they do no have any time frame when that will be released. Expect the Recommendation and the ratings to section of the review tab to be completely remove in the near future. The reviews will stay but the Recommendation and the ratings will be removed.Click to expand...
They've turned our reviews tab off on our page a # of weeks ago, and everytime I turn it back on they turn it off, and reviews aren't showing up on our page anymore.
They've also changed our reviews # to 0 and 0 rating, when we have 40+ reviews and a 5 star rating.
I haven't been able to get anyone to respond to us through support, community, or emailing their support email - how did you get in touch with them?