NEW DELHI: Facebook has launched new communication features for Pages, making it easier for people and businesses to connect through private messaging. Private messaging is a popular way for people to connect with family and friends, and businesses are increasingly using it to connect with their customers.
Messages can now be sent to a Page from local awareness ads and this makes it easy for people to start a private message conversation with businesses directly from an ad.
Replies to comments can be sent privately with a message and allows Page administrators to address customer requests on their Page more effectively. It also helps show which Pages are highly responsive to customer messages through a rating badge displayed on the business’s profile. New tools have been provided for Page administrators to respond faster and track messages more efficiently.
A Blog Post by Facebook says, “There's a reason many people prefer to communicate with friends and family through private messaging: it's fast and convenient. And increasingly people want to communicate with businesses in the same efficient way. Over a billion people visit Pages every month looking for more information from businesses. Today we're 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.
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, Page admins could only respond to customers either through a comment or private message. In the coming weeks, Page admins will be able to reply to public comments with a private message, helping them solve private customer requests more efficiently.
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, additional tools have been built to help people manage messages, including an option to block private messages from businesses.
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.
Facebook has 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.
