New customized Facebook tools

New customized Facebook tools

Facebook is a convenient platform for most customers to keep contact with their favorite brands. Thanks to its new features, brandmark representatives can now exchange messages with potential shoppers a lot easier.

According to Facebook, the total number of private messages people have sent to the more than 50 million pages run by businesses has doubled in the past year, and people leave 2.5 billion public comments on pages each month. Facebook decided to give marketers new tools to respond to customers and manage those communications.

Marketers can now see all the comments people leave on their pages organized in a new section within a page's activity tab. That section will show all the comments and let companies respond to them on a desktop computer, tablet or smartphone.

New tools offered by Facebook mostly apply to the private messages sent between people and businesses using Facebook Messenger. Even if not every company lets people privately message them through Facebook, it’s a definite hit as the "vast majority" do, according to Michael Sharon, product manager for Pages at Facebook.

"We've rolled out a lot of new tools for private messaging because we're seeing a lot more growth there and because it frankly has been an under-utilized channel," Mr. Sharon said.

To award eager companies that use to the full this option, a few months ago Facebook automatically put a badge on pages that have responded within five minutes for 90% of the messages received in the prior week. Now Facebook will let businesses set their own average responsiveness time: within minutes, an hour, hours or a day. If businesses don't set their own responsiveness times, Facebook will automatically do it for them by looking at how quickly a business has typically responded to messages received in the past week.

As businesses aren't always able to immediately respond due to special operating hours, for example, they can now set "away" messages that people will see when they open a private message thread with a business, along with instant replies to salute new messengers. If a page has set an away message, response times to messages sent during those off-hours won't count against the page's responsiveness time.
Facebook has also redesigned the email-like inbox that marketers use to see and respond to the private messages people have sent to a page. This new option lets companies check messages and see a reverse-chronological feed of other times that the given person has interacted with their pages, by sending comments or private messages. They will also be able to check publicly available information from that person's Facebook profile: the city of residence or the occupation of the person. To inform future Facebook-delivered communications between the business and that individual, companies will be able to manually add text-based notes to a message thread, as order information or customer service issues. Businesses will also be able to add categorical tags to a message, so if they identify someone as a repeat customer, they’ll be able to go through those messages easier. Source: http://adage.com/

Sources:
www.adage.com

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