After months of playing in their Facebook toy box the social media giant has finally succumbed to the wishes of many over the past few years and are now rolling out a `Reply` button on each page comment, this of course will now enable you to reply to individual comments as well as the original post.
This simple addition will help make the whole user experience smoother and give it a more of a `forum` feel.
The other major benefit of this is that Facebook are looking at the levels of engagement on posts and are ranking these on the number of `Likes`, `Responses` and `Hides` so in effect those posts and pages with the most engagement will appear higher up the list
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Benefits for a business
So how will you as a business owner benefit from this on your business page?
This will help interaction on a more personal level as you can now reply to an individual within a post as opposed to everyone commenting or reading that same post. Basically your brand can talk straight back to that individual.
So for all admins of your business page this will be a major boost towards engaging with potential customers, existing clients on a 1-2-1 basis.
How is that different to what we already have?
What you have at the moment is the ability to reply to a comment in that thread but which gets posted at the bottom of the original thread and replies. So if there are numerous comments and somebody asks a particular question then your answer or reply will display right at the bottom. Now with this new feature you can reply to that individual question with the reply displaying directly beneath the comment.
And of course your fans or followers will benefit because they can see in an instant if their question or enquiry has been answered rather than scrolling through the whole conversation, which at the moment with a large number of comments does not make any sense when reading through the long conversation!
So how do I get the `Reply` button?
It is quick and simple…
- Go to `Edit Page`in your Admin Panel
- Click on `Manage Permissions` from the dropdown box
- Scroll down to where it says `Replies` near the foot of the page
- Check the box next to `Allow replies to comments on my page`
- Click `Save Changes`
Now when somebody replies to one of your posts you will see a `Reply` option appear as in the screenshot above.
Let me know how you get on with this, but me personally I think it is a good option to have, but then for those of you who know me you do know that I like to talk!
Until next time.
Martin
