Facebook is making sincere efforts to attract more and more small- and medium-sized businesses to make use of its platform for advertising. And it appears that its efforts are bearing fruit as Business Pages on the platform crossed 50 million compared to 40 million in April, the social network said.
Facebook Pages growing popular among businesses
On Tuesday, the company said that every month, 2.5 billion comments are made on these Pages. To push usage further, the company plans to make a series of messaging updates to Pages, making it easier for businesses to talk to customers on the site and across devices.
Michael Sharon, Facebook’s product manager for Pages, said people can contact businesses any time and on any device, and therefore, the company is offering businesses new tools to better manage their customer interactions.
“Now it’s easier for Pages to address both the public comments and private messages that people send them, in order to build and maintain strong relationships,” Sharon said in a blog post.
Facebook informed businesses that it is rolling out the updates globally and will take few months to reach all Pages. It does not come as a surprise that the social network is paying so much attention to messaging as in the past year, the number of messages sent to businesses on the site has more than doubled.
New tools and updates
With the new tools, customers will now get to know from businesses how quickly they can expect a response to their messages, both on their profiles and within Messenger. The businesses will also be able to post an “away” status to let customers know that they are not available currently to reply to their messages. Businesses can also send instant replies to informing them of this, such as an automated note that will greet them and direct them to helpful resources.
Apart from the new tools, Facebook is also revamping the Page inboxes to give companies more context about their customers, like, for example, showing a user’s past interactions with the Page and also the details a user has publicly shared on Facebook, such as their current city. Also adding notes about customers — current orders and customer service preferences — will now be possible for Page admins.
