How To Remove Reviews From Facebook

Negative Facebook reviews are a huge turnoff for potential customers. You can only imagine the consequences for your brand if it becomes a victim of review bombing, with trolls purposely posting bad feedback.

That’s why we’ve created this guide, where we’ll show you how to remove reviews from Facebook to preserve your online reputation.

What Are Facebook Reviews?

Facebook reviews are feedback that customers post on your business’s Facebook page. These reviews can just be ratings or ratings with recommendations. 

Unlike many other social platforms, Facebook isn’t anonymous. These are real people posting real reviews. Good Facebook reviews indicate past customers have had a positive experience with your brand, likely influencing potential customers to do business with you.

The Basics of Removing Reviews From Facebook

Facebook for business is a blessing and a curse. With nearly 3 billion people using the platform, you get exposure like no other—but you’ll also find yourself dealing with inappropriate or unfair feedback.

Let’s take a look at how you can tackle this issue.

Understanding Whether a Review on Facebook Is Fake

Before we discuss deleting or removing Facebook reviews, you need to identify whether a customer review is fake in the first place.

For starters, it’s helpful to maintain a customer database and transactional records to cross-check a negative review from a customer. Does the negative review match or closely resemble an existing customer? Do you have a customer complaint on the file matching the events recounted in the review?

If it does, the review is genuine, and you should work on resolving it with tact. But if the review doesn’t align with any of your business records, it’s fake. 

Here are a few common red flags to easily spot a fake Facebook review:

• The account has one of those typical fake names. Think: John Retartagan, Patty O’Furniture, Olive Yew
• The account is created on the same day as the day of the review—and for the sole purpose of giving your business a bad review
• The account profile picture is copied from somewhere else
• The account is connected to a competitor or a former employee
• The posted review has an inaccurate description of your business’s product or service is filled with silly grammatical errors or recommends your competitor in the complaint

Unfortunately, removing fake Facebook reviews isn’t as easy as you might hope.

Deleting Facebook Reviews From Customers Isn’t Possible

Can you remove or delete Facebook reviews? No, you cannot delete a legitimate review on Facebook, however malicious. 

This is because of Facebook’s policy to provide a reliable and transparent review system to its users. If it allowed businesses to tamper with reviews, people would lose their trust in Facebook and not see it as a reliable source of information.

But Facebook doesn’t extend the same courtesy to fake reviews made from shady and fake accounts. If the review is flagrant and/or in obvious violation of its community standards, Facebook will remove it. 

In other cases, Facebook is unlikely to take down a Facebook recommendation. The scathing and unfair review will stay connected to your page unless you take a few remedial and preventive actions.

Deleting or Editing Facebook Reviews That You Wrote

You can delete or edit a Facebook review that you’ve written. This holds true for your personal account as well as your business account.

Simply locate the review you want to remove or edit and click on the three dots.

Select Edit Review to make changes, and click Save when you’re done. Otherwise, you can just click Delete Review and tap Delete again to confirm the removal.

If you’re having trouble finding the review on a page, you can also locate it by:

1. Tapping your profile picture from your feed
2. Clicking the three dots
3. Navigating to Activity Log
4. Locating the review from past activity
5. Select Edit Review or Delete Review (same as above)

Again, these steps only work for reviews that you’ve written yourself. You do not have the power to delete a review that was written by somebody else.

Reporting a Review on Facebook 

If the Facebook review goes against Facebook‘s Community Standards, you can flag it. To do this, the review should either be clearly fake or contain one or more of the following prohibited forms of speech:

• Bullying
• Hate speech
• Misrepresentation
• Cruelness and insensitivity

Facebook‘s Community Standards are broad, but the platform is quick to remove a Facebook recommendation if it’s ingenuine or overly offensive.

You can report a review on Facebook by following these steps:

1. Log into your Facebook business page.
2. Click on the Reviews tab on the top menu bar. Go to the review you want to report.
3. Click on the three dots on the top right hand of the review.
4. Select Report post from the displayed options. A pop-up window will appear on your screen.

5. Select the most appropriate description from the displayed list, and follow the prompts to finish the process.

After reporting a Facebook recommendation, all you can do is wait. Facebook will review your request, and if it finds the review goes against its Community Standards, it’ll remove the review forever.

Respond to Your Real Negative Facebook Reviews 

If legitimate customers have left bad Facebook recommendations, you need to respond positively and promptly as part of customer service.

Start with an apology and address the matter at hand, followed by offering a viable solution moving forward. If you do this right, you can change your customer’s negative experience into a positive one. It’ll also show potential customers your company cares about its customers and is serious about helping them.

Keep the following in mind when you respond to:

• Be sympathetic and non-confrontational
• Try to respond to recommendations promptly
• Keep your response short, sweet, and concise

Make sure customers are happy with your suggestion and reassure all customers that if things go wrong, you’ve always got their back. We have an in-depth guide that further explains how responding to negative reviews professionally and tactfully can work in your favor.

Respond to Your Positive Reviews Too

You should respond to all reviews left on your Facebook page—not just the negative ones. Here’s why.

First of all, anyone taking the time out of their day to provide feedback and write a review deserves to be recognized. This is especially true for people who are sharing compliments and kind words about your business.

But if you’re only responding to negative reviews, it will only draw more attention to the bad ones when people are scrolling through your timeline.

This way, anyone who visits your business page will see responses to every review. So the negative ones won’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Turning Off or Disabling Facebook Reviews

If you feel a negative review is hurting your business—or don’t want to deal with the trouble of worrying about bad or fake reviews, you can take a more extreme measure: disable Facebook recommendations entirely.

To be clear, turning off the review section will hide all the recommendations left by past customers, both positive and negative. This also doesn’t give you a clean slate—you’ll see all reviews again upon enabling Facebook reviews in the future. Still, this is an excellent option if you have several fake reviews.

Here are the steps to disable reviews from Facebook:

1. Open your business page, making sure you’re logged in as the page admin.
2. Click on Settings at the top right of the page.
3. Navigate to the left-hand side of the page, and select Templates and Tab from the menu. 
4. Scroll down to Reviews, and click on Settings.
5. To the right of the Show Reviews option, you’ll see a slider. Click on it to disable it.

6. Select Save to confirm your new settings.

Now, customers can no longer see any negative feedback on your business’s Facebook page.

2 Tools to Remove Reviews From Facebook

Managing your online reputation is important, regardless of your business size and industry. Below, we’ve put together a list of two reliable online reputation management companies that can help you manage negative reviews on Facebook.

Nextiva

Before you can flag a review for removal on Facebook, the first thing you need to do is identify which reviews should be removed. Thanks to Nextiva, you can get real-time notifications based on specific tags and alerts you’ve set up.

This is one of the fastest ways to identify reviews that fit Facebook’s removal criteria, so you can report violations quickly to ensure they’re taken down ASAP.

Best of all, Nextiva uses AI-powered monitoring and listening tools to help you manage reviews beyond Facebook. So you can set up these same types of alerts across all review sites and remove bad reviews faster than ever before.

Birdeye

Birdeye offers a wide range of reputation management solutions, but it’s the integrations with Facebook and Google that set it apart.

With Birdeye, you can auto-send review requests, respond to customer reviews on Facebook and other sites, and gather actionable insights with Natural language Processing (NLP). Review monitoring and management, review generation, and review marketing are the other desirable features.

You can also build a custom profile that can be beneficial to generate awareness and get more customers to check out your products and services. The fact that all these services are available on a single platform makes things even more convenient.

5 Tricks for Removing Reviews from Facebook

The following tricks and best practices will help you take control of your Facebook reviews:

Manage Your Emotions

Fake reviews can be upsetting. But don’t let your emotions get the best of you. This type of behavior does not solve your problem—and it may put your brand in a negative light.

Have trust in your business. Work on offering high-quality products and services that consistently yield positive reviews. Don’t lower your ethical standards just because somebody else decides to play dirty. 

Remember, anything you write on Facebook can be viewed by the public. While it’s ok to privately message a customer to resolve a situation, it’s never ok to bash them or lose your cool. Not only is this bad business but there’s a good chance that those screenshots will end up being seen in the public eye.

Get More Positive Reviews

Positive reviews are the best way to offset fake reviews and negative comments. 

Reach out to customers who have positive experiences with your brand, and politely ask them to drop in a good word on your Facebook page. You can also offer them incentives like exclusive discounts or free goodies to make them more likely to turn the odds in your favor.

No business is perfect, and customers understand that. It’s normal for businesses to have negative remarks mixed into customer reviews. So one or two bad reviews won’t be the end of you.

But if you’re able to get lots of positive reviews on Facebook, the handful of negative comments will be an afterthought to prospective customers.

Hire a Reputation Management Service

Take control of your Facebook reviews and protect your online reputation by working with a reliable reputation management company.

A reputation management company can build an effective online reputation management strategy for your business. These services can help remove fake Facebook reviews by overcoming roadblocks in Facebook‘s reporting process—and if they can’t, the service can suppress fake reviews effectively to hide them from prospective customers.

Reputation management services can also help you get more positive reviews on Facebook. So whether you need fake reviews removed, new reviews from happy customers, or a combination of both, a reputation management service can get the job done.

Over time, the negative reviews will be drowned out and all anyone will see is the high star rating of your business.

Set Alerts For New Facebook Reviews

If you get a negative Facebook review, it’s important that you act quickly.

Again, the removal process isn’t instant. So any delay on your end will just prolong the process and leave the review on your page for more time than it needs to be there.

To ensure you’re acting quickly, you can set up alerts each time a new review is left on your Facebook page. Most reputation management services offer some type of review dashboard with custom alerts. You can also use Birdeye to set up alerts and streamline the way you monitor online reviews.

Reply to Negative Facebook Reviews

There’s no guarantee that every bad Facebook review on your page will get removed. Even if it does get removed, there’s a chance it stays live for a week or longer.

In the meantime, you should respond to all of your Facebook reviews—including the negative ones that you want removed.

Replying to reviews shows your customers that you care. It also shows anyone else who reads the review that you’ve acknowledged any mistakes and taken steps to fix the situation.

If that review ends up getting removed, that’s great! But at least your audience will see that you’ve replied while it’s still active.

Removing Facebook Reviews: Your Top Questions Answered

What to Do Next

Now that you know how to remove reviews from Facebook, it’s time to focus on building a sound social media marketing strategy.

Admittedly, social media marketing isn’t easy. You have to spend time learning how to do it right. Luckily, there are a few strategies and techniques to make data-based decisions, steering your business towards success. When done properly, you can get more traffic for your business, score more positive reviews, and improve conversion rates.

Here are a few Quick Sprout guides to help you get started on the right track:

• How to Effectively Market Your Small Business on Social Media
• The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing
• The Beginner’s Guide to the Best Strategies to Manage Your Online Reputation