How Businesses can take advantage of the new Facebook Comment Replies

Facebook recently rolled out a new change for business pages. The ability to reply to a comment directly on Facebook. This can be justified as an effort on Facebook’s part to make the relationship between merchants and buyers on the social network easier and more convenient.

Currently in testing phase, this new system enables page owners to directly reply to a commenter on their Facebook page or a status, instead of trying to tag the person in a reply on the status. With this, it increases direct engagement of a brand with the user.

This option is currently available for only business pages with over 10,000 likes.

Apart from this feature, Facebook also added that the most relevant comments, with the most engagement will be pushed to the top of a post. This means that conversations on a post won’t remain in the chronological order as before, but based on the following factors:

• Positive Feedback: The amount of positive feedback based on the total number of Likes and Replies in a conversation thread, which includes Likes or Replies by the Page owner.
• Connections: Connections to participants in a thread may move the conversation higher. For example, conversations with Comments left by friends may appear at the top.
• Negative Feedback:The total number of spam reports in a thread, as well as marks-as-spam made by the Page owner. We also may down-rank comments made by frequent spammers.

*source:Facebook

The ability to reply to an individual user comment will help brands in establishing a direct contact with the users who comment on their posts, increasing relevancy of the brand for the user, with the chance of converting them into customers. Which is what a brand wants at the end of their social marketing efforts.

How do you think this feature will help brands on Facebook? Share your thoughts in the comments below. 🙂