Facebook Reviews Management for Contractors

Search Console shows contractors looking for this in trade-specific language — reviews management for plumbing, reputation management for garage doors, reviews software for garage doors — and almost everything written for them is an agency pitch built on a version of Facebook that no longer exists. Facebook Pages have not had a conventional star-review system for years. They have Recommendations, and the mechanics of Recommendations decide what a contractor can actually change.

Through Recommendations, not star ratings. Meta's documentation states that a Page's rating is based on the reviews and recommendations people share about the business Page on Facebook, that only Pages which turn Recommendations on may show a rating, and that a Page may not have a rating at all if it has not received at least five reviews.

• A Page rating is derived from reviews and recommendations people share, not from individual star selections - Meta Help Centre.
• Only Pages that turn on Recommendations may show a rating at all - Meta Help Centre.
• A Page may not have a rating if it has not received at least five reviews - Meta Help Centre.
• Only recommendations shared publicly are included in a Page's overall rating - Meta Help Centre.
• The review count a Page admin sees is the number of public reviews, which are the only ones that feed the recommendation score - Meta Help Centre.
• Public reviews carry a globe icon next to the date they were posted - Meta Help Centre.
• Pages that previously had reviews had Recommendations turned on automatically - Meta Help Centre.

Two documented reasons, and it is almost always one of them. Either Recommendations are switched off for the Page, in which case no rating can display at all, or the Page has not yet accumulated five reviews. Both are stated directly in Meta's Help Centre, and both are fixable in an afternoon rather than a quarter.

No. You can report one that breaches Community Standards, and Meta may remove it. You can also turn Recommendations off entirely, which its documentation says removes the rating and the reviews from your Page. What you cannot do is selectively delete an unflattering recommendation that breaks no rules, and any vendor promising that is selling something they cannot deliver.

• You can report a Recommendation or review that does not follow Meta's Community Standards - Meta Help Centre.
• Turning Recommendations off disables them and removes the rating and reviews from your Page - Meta Help Centre.
• Meta states it does not verify that users purchased the product or used the service they are reviewing or recommending - Meta Help Centre.
• Removed reviews may have been taken down for breaching Community Standards, which is why a review can disappear without the business doing anything - Meta Help Centre.

Almost never. It is a real setting with a documented effect, and the effect is that your rating and your reviews disappear together. Contractors reach for it after one bad month and lose four years of accumulated goodwill to hide a single one-star. The exception is a Page being actively brigaded, where switching off is a temporary tourniquet rather than a strategy.

Less than the search demand for reviews management suggests. BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers found people use an average of six different review sites, and that consistent sentiment across multiple sites is the top factor for 56% of them. For most home service buyers the decision happens on Google, with Facebook acting as corroboration rather than the primary source.

Recent enough that a buyer checking today sees something from this quarter. 74% of consumers prioritise reviews from the last three months, 32% look for feedback from the past two weeks, and 18% only trust reviews posted within one week. A 4.9 rating built entirely from reviews two years old fails a test the average never shows.

Substantially, and replying badly is its own risk. 80% of consumers say they are more likely to use a business that responds to all reviews and 42% are unlikely to use one that ignores feedback — but 50% view generic templated responses negatively. A copy-pasted thank-you on twenty reviews can read worse than silence.

• 80% are more likely to use a business that responds to all reviews - BrightLocal 2026.
• 42% are unlikely to use a business that ignores feedback - BrightLocal 2026.
• 50% view generic templated responses negatively - BrightLocal 2026.
• 19% expect a same-day response and 81% expect a reply within one week - BrightLocal 2026.

A text with a direct link, sent while the technician is still on site or within the hour, naming the person who did the work. That is our operational view rather than a research finding, but the mechanism is obvious: the job is fresh, the phone is already in the customer's hand, and the friction is one tap instead of a search.

• Send by SMS with a direct link rather than by email with instructions.
• Send within the hour, not three days later when the memory has faded.
• Name the technician — people write more specific reviews about a person than about a company.
• For Facebook specifically, tell them to set the audience to Public, or the recommendation will not count toward your rating.
• Ask every customer, not only the delighted ones. Selective asking based on expected sentiment breaches the major platforms' policies and skews your own data.
• Never offer anything of value in exchange for a review.

Yes, most directly on Google Local Services Ads, where review count and rating carry ranking weight and the leads arrive as phone calls. A weak review profile suppresses impressions on the channel with the strongest published economics — SearchLight's February 2026 benchmark put LSA at a 43.9% book rate and $233 per paying customer across 888 contractors.

Check whether Recommendations are on and whether you have cleared five public reviews, because those two settings decide whether anything else matters. Then fix the request flow so reviews arrive continuously rather than in bursts, reply to everything without templating it, and put the majority of the effort into Google rather than Facebook.