Facebook Messages: A New Way to Take Control Over Negative Comments – Finally!

By Stevie Sleeter, Content & Social Media Manager

Published: August 20, 2015

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Have you heard of some of the great changes with Facebook messages?

The longstanding, overarching philosophy on responding to negative comments from your customers on Facebook has been to try to take the conversation “offline”, or at least off of a visible place such as your Facebook posts. However, the only real way to do this was to put the responsibility in the customer’s hands. You’d need to respond to their comment by saying something like, “Jon, we’d love to help you. Can you please send us a private message, or email [email protected], or call us at 555-555-5555?” directly within a string of comments on your post or ad. This works, but Facebook has come up with an even better solution.

Now, some pages have the ability to select “message” to a comment, and you, as the brand or company, can finally take control over the conversation and directly reach out to the customer by sending them a private message. This is huge! This drastically reduces the headache experienced by waiting for, or possibly never hearing back from a customer so you can attempt to save the relationship.

Here’s the quick rundown of what you need to know about the Facebook messaging changes. Facebook rolls their changes out slowly, so not every page has this feature yet.

  1. Some Facebook users have the ability to click “message” as an added option to liking, sharing, or commenting on a post. This allows them to directly private message you as a company, right from the post itself.
  2. Some Facebook pages have the ability to respond to a user’s comment by selecting “message” in addition to liking or commenting. This allows you to send them a private message.
  3. By making it easier for you to directly reach out to your customers, Facebook wants to reward and encourage you to reach out to your customers faster by adding a response icon to your page, but you’ll need to maintain average response times within 5 minutes for at least 90% of your messages.

Ultimately, this is good news for both consumers and Facebook administrators, as it enhances the user’s experience, and makes your life as an administrator easier, especially as it relates to responding to negative messages.

Five minutes is a pretty fast response time, and many pages are not staffed to respond this quickly. Envano has resources and packages available to supplement your team to meet this requirement. Contact us now to explore how we can help.