Facebook is rolling out a number of new features for Pages designed to make it easier for businesses to communicate with customers.
The biggest change, or at least the one consumers will see, is an expansion on an existing feature, where businesses add a badges to their Pages declaring that they’re “very responsive to messages” — but only if they respond to 90 percent of messages within five minutes.
The thing is, there’s a lot of room between responding within five minutes and never responding at all. So Page owners will also be able to identify whether they respond within minutes, within an hour, within hours or within a day. They can also specify when they’re “away” and won’t be responding.
Altogether, this creates more of an expectation that businesses will have a constant, active presence through their Pages, and helps customers identify the businesses that are on-board.
To help businesses stay on top of those customer messages, Facebook says it’s also redesigning its inbox to allow Page owners to add internal notes about users and add tags to categorize conversations. In addition, it’s adding a new tool for monitoring Page comments.
In a company blog post, Facebook wrote:
As mobile device usage continues to push people to communicate with businesses in real time, businesses need tools to manage communication efficiently. These new features help admins build and a manage a convenient, personal and scalable communication channel for customers, so businesses can connect with people easily and focus on growing their business.
While there are some complaints about the usefulness of Pages, at least as a marketing tool, as it becomes harder to get on consumers’ newsfeeds, but the company says there are now 50 million active Pages, up from 40 million in April. (And hey, there’s a new POTUS Page.) These new features are supposed to become available to every Page over the next few months.