What the changes to Facebook business pages will mean for you

Facebook’s done it again. They’re changing the way business pages can interact with their customers; but this time it’s a brilliant change!

Changes to how you can respond to your customers:

Previously, you could only respond to customers in the way they chose to contact you. If a customer wrote on your wall, you couldn’t private message (PM) them as your business page. You either had to ask them to email you, or worse yet, inbox them as your personal profile.

Messaging is the preferred option for a lot of Facebook users and these changes mean that when you receive a comment publicly on your wall, you can either like, comment, or message. By choosing message, you’re taking the conversation to a private space to maintain customer privacy. The BEST part about this is the public comment will have a notification to say that the business private inboxed the customer. So people stalking your business page to see what your customer service is like will see that you followed up. This is great for dealing with negative customer responses as you can finalise them privately, as well as when you have to ask for private info like a phone number or address to follow up for a customer.

Incentives for businesses to be responsive to customers:

The changes will also see a bit more of an incentive for business pages to be responsive to their customers. If a business page responds to 90% of messages within 5 minutes, they will receive a ‘very responsive to messages’ button at the top of their page.

  

Call to action for Facebook advertising:

Facebook ads can be an excellent way to connect products with a targeted segment of Facebook users and this year with the introduction of ‘call to action’, businesses could add a button for customers to click like ‘shop now’, ‘book now’ and ‘learn more’. These ‘call to action’ buttons really made marketers think about user experience and taking their customers from ‘I need a new dress’ to ‘shop now’. These strong ‘call to action’ buttons saw greater click through rates and a more streamlined customer experience. But there wasn’t a soft option. Sometimes customers want to chat about the product before they make a purchase, or they’re in the process of social-vetting and aren’t quite ready to take the plunge. Facebook have added a ‘send message’ button to their line-up of call to actions. This means that customers see the ad and have the option to ask you questions about it. I personally cannot wait to do some A:B testing to see which CTAs work best!

  

These changes are starting to be roll out and you should start seeing the options over the coming weeks. What do you think of the changes?