Facebook adds new messaging options to Pages

Facebook Pages have become a common way for businesses to stay in contact with their customers, allowing them to post statuses with relevant information and allowing customers to reply to the statuses. In addition, customers are able to communicate with the businesses through private messaging on Pages. Today the social network updated its Pages' communication features, including new messaging options for users who want to talk with a company. This includes sending messages to companies through a dedicated message button on their Facebook advertisements.

Facebook introduced the new features today, and among them is a new "send message" button located on so – called local awareness ads for people to send a private message to a business Page from within their newsfeed. The social network says this gives its users a personal way to connect with businesses straight through it advertisement network. Whether users are interested in doing that is another matter.

On the receiving end, businesses that are sent messages through their advertisements will receive an attachment of the ad that resulted in the personal message. If a private message is sent to a business, that business will then be able to reply directly back to the user.

Joining this is a new feature that is likely to be more useful for businesses, allowing them to respond to a comment directly through a private message. This will help with, for example, instances where customers reply to statuses with questions or requests for help. Under this feature, businesses will be able to click "message" and reply to that customer both directly and privately. When this happens, the comment will show a little tag letting other visitors know that the business owner responded to the message privately.

Other new tools include a tag on pages that will show how responsive it is to messages, such as very responsive. In addition, businesses can now create and save common responses to questions they receive frequently. These responses will be saved as replies and can be easily accessed by the Page's admin(s).

SOURCE: Facebook