Phil Edwards has a great post on the Lonely CEO blog about how to prevent application reviews from damaging user growth. As most successful application developers know, keeping users happy requires responding regularly to critical feedback. Recently, Facebook updated application pages to display user reviews so that new users can see what sort of feedback users have been giving. I have even seen a few people aggressively target applications to try to damage their overall rating.

I definitely do not recommend these types of tactics as Facebook will most definitely begin to track user feedback history and penalize those that attempt to unjustly damage other applications’ ratings. Currently, application developers cannot remove poor reviews and this can make it difficult to obtain new users. In order to work around the issue, Phil has suggested that application owners do two things:

1. Drag the wall above the reviews section on the application about page. This will ensure that most negative feedback is entered on the wall rather than on the reviews.
2. Display reviews only to installed users. There is a setting for applications that enables reviews only to be displayed to those users that have installed the application.

Have you had any issues with application reviews? Do you think Facebook should make reporting a more efficient process?