Facebook is introducing new communication features for Pages, including more ways for customers to send private messages to businesses and new tools for Page admins to manage and respond to messages.
The new “Send Message” call-to-action button for local awareness ads allows people to initiate private conversations with business Pages from News Feed ads, giving people a personal way to connect with businesses directly from ads.
When someone clicks on the “Send Message” button in an ad, the Facebook Messenger window opens for them to write and send messages to the business. Incoming messages to Pages include an attachment that shows which ad prompted the person to reach out, and once someone initiates a message with the business, the business can reply and follow up as necessary.
Advertisers can start using the “Send Message” call-to-action button by creating a new local awareness ad and selecting “Send Message” in the “Call to Action” field.
Until now in facebook business page, admins could only respond to customers in the same way that the person reached out to the Page, either through a comment or private message. But in the coming weeks, Facebook said “Page admins will be able to reply to public comments with a private message”, helping them solve private customer requests more efficiently.
To reply privately to a customer comment, Page admins can click the new “Message” option, and a private message thread with the commenter will open. The message from the Page includes a link to the customer’s comment for reference.
When a business responds privately to a comment, the comment shows a note that the business responded privately, so other Page visitors know that the business handled the request.
To make sure the messaging experience is valuable for both businesses and people, Facebook have built additional tools to help people manage messages, including an option to block private messages from businesses.
As people consider reaching out to businesses on Facebook through messages, they can now identify Pages that are very responsive to private messages. Pages that respond to 90% of messages and have a median response time of less than five minutes will now have a “Very responsive to messages” badge on their profiles.
Responsiveness ratings are dynamic and calculated based on data from the last seven days. All Page admins will now see their Page’s response rate and median response time in Page Insights, but, for now, only the Pages who meet the 90% response rate and less-than-five-minute response time will have the public badge.
Now that people and businesses have more ways to initiate messages with each other, Page admins need features that help them manage and respond to messages.
To help Page admins respond faster to incoming messages, they can now create and save responses to common questions. Page admins can pull up saved replies and send them in one tap, making it faster and easier to respond to customers from mobile devices. Page admins also have the option to edit saved responses before they send them.
Facebook have also updated the admin inbox to make it easier to keep track of messages. Page admins can now conduct the following actions in bulk: archive, delete, flag and mark messages as read, unread and spam.
Messaging has become a preferred communication channel for people, and now people and businesses on Facebook can start real-time conversations with each other in more ways.
Earlier in July, Facebook officially said that it will share ad revenue with its video creators, thereby it makes video publishers to publish their videos directly onto its platform.
