Facebook Recommendations: What Hotels Need To Know
A couple of months ago, I noticed more and more people on my Facebook feed looking for recommendations. ‘Where should I take my mother to lunch in Los Angeles?’ ‘What’s a good wellness retreat?’ ‘Where should I stay in Florida?’ As it turns out, according to Facebook, one out of every three people on Facebook uses the platform to look for recommendations and reviews.
As a result, the social media giant has made some changes to focus on uncovering whether consumers recommend (or don’t recommend) a business. It’s like NPS for dummies. Here’s what Hotels need to know about the updates on facebook:
How it works
Most business pages now ask the following question in the Reviews section: ‘Do you recommend Hotel XYZ?’ Once you answer the question, you can write your minimum 25-character review, which is much shorter than the 200-character requirement from TripAdvisor. It is frustrating to see a Google star review that lacks context, so we know hoteliers will appreciate that Facebook requires consumers to offer qualitative feedback when they select ‘no’ in response to this question.
Image Source: Helping People Connect with Local Businesses
Additionally, hotel reviews are different than restaurant reviews. If you answer ‘yes’ to the question on a restaurant’s business page, you are prompted to select positive tags to describe the restaurant, such as ‘great service,’ ‘free Wi-Fi,’ or ‘romantic.’ If you answer ‘no,’ you can choose from negative tags such as ‘dirty,’ ‘rude service,’ and ‘noisy.’ Once you select the tags, you can write your review.
The tags feature is interesting because it not only allows themes to develop around your business, it makes it easier for Facebook to use the data to make recommendations down the line when people are looking to make decisions.
Image Source: Helping People Connect with Local Businesses
But Facebook is smart and knows that people are sharing business feedback throughout the site, not just on business pages. Consumers are also prompted to respond to the recommendation question when they write about businesses in status updates, in groups, and in comments. Once a consumer responds to the question, the feedback will be shared on the business’s page in the Reviews section.
What this means for hoteliers
First, hoteliers need to come to terms with the fact that not everyone will recommend your business. It will hurt when you hear “no,” maybe even more than a one-star review. But remember that you still have the opportunity to respond to feedback that is shared on your page. You are still capturing valuable feedback that allows you to understand guest sentiment and make informed business decisions. So while it might sting, there is value in the data.
We also think that positive reviews will have a longer shelf life. In the past, a review might fall below the fold on your page and slowly fade away. Now, because Facebook surfaces recommendations to people looking to make decisions, reviews might be visible long after they are written, especially since Facebook confirms that recommendations from friends will be surfaced more prominently.
Since we know that recommendations from friends carry more weight than those of strangers, getting people to recommend your hotel and write reviews on Facebook might prove to be very lucrative. If you’re not encouraging your happy customers to write reviews, now is a great time to start. Keep in mind that Facebook is also automatically driving new reviews by watching for check-ins and business mentions and prompting reviews.
Finally, with all the uproar about fake content on Facebook, it’s no surprise that there is a focus on ‘authentic recommendations.’ Facebook wants to ensure that reviews are honest and based on actual experiences, so they enabled a feature for businesses to report content that is fraudulent, spam, or paid for.
We look forward to watching this evolution alongside our customers and are here to support you. Revinate will notify you, in the app, when we roll out features to capture your recommendation information. For now, stay on top of your responses by monitoring your Facebook reviews within Revinate. We will continue to capture your reviews in Revinate so you can craft timely replies. As always, please let us know if we can help.
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