Today, Facebook has launched new ways for businesses and consumers to privately communicate on the social network.
The new tools let businesses reply directly to user comments via a private message, the ability to send messages directly from an advert, along with adding a new “responsiveness” rating for business pages.
Replying to comments with private messages
The most useful new tool for brands is the ability to reply to public comments with a private message.
This is to help businesses solve requests and comments from customers in a private manner.
To do this, Page admins click the new “Message” option, and a private message thread with the commenter will open, that includes a link to the customer’s initial comment.
So that other commenters and visitors to your page know you’ve responded, a note appears saying you handled the request privately.
On the consumer side, users can also opt to block private messages from businesses.
Private messages from ads
Consumers will also soon be able to contact businesses directly from local awareness ads.
On ads there will be a “Send Message” button, which users can click to open up a private message with a business.
When the business receives the message, it will say which ad prompted the comment.
To use the feature, advertisers create a new local awareness ad, and select “Send Message” in the “Call to Action” field.
Responsiveness rating for businesses
And with the introduction of these new messaging features, brands will now get a responsiveness rating on their pages.
Pages that respond to 90% of messages and have a median response time of less than five minutes, will now get a “Very responsive to messages” badge on their profiles.
The ratings are calculated on the data from the last seven days, and the responsiveness stats will be viewable in Page Insights.
However at the moment, only people who meet the 90% response rate will get a public badge.
Tools to save time
With these new features, it is likely businesses will receive many more messages from consumers, so Facebook has also introduced tools to help Page admins save time when responding.
Brands can now create and save responses to common questions, and send them in one tap, making it quicker and easier to respond.
Find out more about the new features here.