Remember how Facebook has been silently asking you to rate the books you’ve read and the places you’ve been to out of five stars? It looks like the social networking website has plans up its sleeve to put these accumulated ratings to good use. A small subset of users are already starting to see these ratings now appear on Pages, letting them know how well the peers think the place or organisation performs. A report by TechCrunch has revealed that Facebook has rolled these ratings out for Pages in a hush-hush manner. These ratings are giving an edge to user sentiment, somewhat more than what just a “Like’ could reveal. Facebook had been collecting ratings about places users had checked-in at or had liked earlier. All of these ratings will now be displayed out of five-stars on an establishment or brand’s official Facebook pages.
Five-star! (Image credit: TechCrunch)
The star-system pretty much turns Facebook into a portal to turn to as far as peer reviews about places go. Quite like a Foursquare or a Zomato, people will ensure they’re looking at ratings on Facebook as well before they head off to a place to shop or dine. What Facebook has going for it is its large user-base who will keep rating places as and when they’re prompted to.
Facebook in a statement has admitted to testing ratings for Pages. "We’re extending star ratings on Facebook from mobile to desktop – to make it easier for people to discover great businesses around them. This is beneficial for both businesses and consumers. Star ratings encourage more people to rate a business, making it eligible to appear in News Feed and help others discover a business they didn’t know about previously. For businesses themselves, this also leads to greater brand awareness," a spokesperson said.
The feature still seems to be under testing by Facebook but if it does roll out uniformly the world over, local discovery will have a whole new dimension to it. Establishments will not just have to ensure that they have a great social media presence but will also have to ensure that they’re doing equally well offline since that will affect its online ratings. This is not to say that they haven’t been doing it already; with Foursquare and Yelp amongst other rating services available, establishments have been trying to strike the right balance between online and offline service since a few years now but with Facebook getting into ratings, the game has just become a little more intense.
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