On August 5, 2015, Facebook launched a new feature called “pages messaging.” This special feature for Facebook business pages now allows anyone to send private messages directly to a company through the company’s Facebook advertisements that appear on the news feed, making these online promotions more personal and direct bridges of communication between businesses and those whom they serve.

Here is what these new advertisements look like:

All visitors also have the ability to send private messages to your page at any time using this new message-button feature:

image source: eremedia.com

Now the burning question that every business is asking is: How do we take advantage of the new Facebook pages messaging to improve our customer communications for better social media marketing and public relations?

The new Facebook pages-messaging feature expands the ways in which businesses can communicate to their customers with these four great additional benefits:

1. You can move customer complaints out of the spotlight by responding more professionally in private messages. Facebook announced that “Until now, Page admins could only respond to customers in the same way that the person reached out to the Page, either through a comment or private message. In the coming weeks, Page admins will be able to reply to public comments with a private message, helping them solve private customer requests more efficiently.”This excellent public-relations move makes it harder for trolls and disruptive page visitors to cause a ruckus with your fans, and everyone will benefit from dealing with less spam messages posted to your page when you’re trying to respectfully reply to others. Plus, Facebook now shows a note to all your visitors each time you respond to a public customer request privately. This brilliant move maintains the privacy of you and your client’s personal relationship while also helping a company keep a good public image.
2. Get more positive attention from visitors by earning highly responsive status.
   

   image source: tnerd.com

   Organizations can now receive more recognition by earning new “Very Responsive to Messages” public badges on their Facebook profiles.

   To get this badge, your company only needs to reply to at least 90 percent of all your received messages and respond in less than five minutes on average to each person within any given week. Having this badge is a great motivator to stay in touch with clients and gives you another way to rise above your competition.

3. Respond faster to everyone with automated responses that you can edit at any time. Any Facebook-page administrator now has the ability to write and save personalized answers to their most-frequently asked questions. Each saved message will still remain open for edits before sending too. This feature will save social-media managers lots of time while also keeping a high-response time rating for their companies.
4. Tap into powerful, new analytics data that shows how strong your advertisements really are. David Gilbert of the International Business Times describes that, “While the new Pages Messaging system may not have immediate and obvious benefits for customers, for businesses it could provide some very important analytical data.Page admins will be able to see which ads specifically people have clicked on to send them messages.”This kind of data is a goldmine for those who need to see how popular each particular advertisement is in real time and how effective their campaigns really are.

What will Facebook pages messaging mean to you and your clients in the future?

Chris Crum sums up why businesses need to utilize these new features by saying:

“What it boils down to, according to Twitter, is being friendly — empathizing with consumers and offering help — being personal by using real names and signing every reply, being responsive by responding in less than an hour, and being accessible by following up to ensure problems have been resolved. As we’ve looked at numerous times, businesses are generally falling behind on consumer expectations on social media. It’s clear that this is becoming more of a focal point for both Facebook and Twitter.”

Essentially, Facebook understands that no organization wants to spend money buying Facebook advertising unless they can see the true value of that promotion. These new pages messaging features are, therefore, more valuable for corporations since they tap into the huge audience of those who already prefer communicating online through Facebook messenger.

Taking it one step further, David Gilbert claims that Facebook pages messaging ” … is expected to be a forerunner of Messenger for Business.”

Furthermore, he notes that “Clearly Facebook is concerned about rushing too many features out to users too fast on mobile and while there have been a number of business-focused features announced for Messenger, the company has yet to fully embrace it as a commercial platform, letting its user base grow organically first.”