It appears that Facebook is working to re-emphasize its star-rating system for brand Pages.
As reported first today by Inside Facebook, the social network is displaying numerical ratings, rather than only the star icons it previously showed. And when you hover your cursor over the ratings, a full rundown of all the establishment’s ratings appears. Here’s how it looks:
The ratings feature appears on Pages that choose to include a physical address in their Pages settings. When Facebook rolled out the star system last November, it was seen as a possible competitor for Yelp, Foursquare and Google+ Local in the local review market.
Facebook hasn’t announced the change, but it appears to be widespread; we couldn’t find any Pages that didn’t have the new display. We’ve reached out to Facebook and will update if we get a response.
Postscript (April 18, 4:46 p.m.): A Facebook spokesman responded and said Facebook was testing the display of the decimal average this week (after people said they couldn’t differentiate between, say, a 4.3 and 4.7 rating). Testing went well, so the display will be rolled out soon to all pages. Also a slight correction, the spokesman said the ability to hover and see more ratings data isn’t new; it’s been available for “some time.”
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