Should message responsiveness matter to a business page?
You might say ‘yep because why else would Facebook have it as a feature?’.
Remember, Facebook makes money when you’re on their App because it can sell things to you or sell things to others about you. Whenever I look at a Facebook feature I always look at what it is about that feature that benefits Facebook so I know whether it’s relevant to me. Because I don’t have time to waste on features that won’t benefit me.
The ‘responsiveness to messages’ badge is a gimmic. If you’re a fast responder your audience will see it when they visit their page but if you’re not they just won’t see anything at all about it.
BUT being responsive to messages is important because if someone is taking the time to message you they are obviously interested in your brand.
That said, the type of brand you are determines how to manage your messaging.
For example – if you’re a not-for-profit it’s generally accepted to have multiple people respond. Personally, I advise clients to make sure to give their name as well because it’s just polite to let someone know who they’re speaking to, frankly.
If you’re a business you can do the same thing as not-for-profits. But if you’re a personal brand you need to determine if having others message you will hurt your interactions.
And regardless of what type of entity you are – if you don’t have a predetermined brand voice set up across the board you will likely hurt your interaction regardless of whatever system you have that manages these messages.
On top of that – if you have a brand voice this will also inform your content and captions – it’s important stuff.
So how do you determine your brand voice (and if you’ve made it this far well done too haha).
Well it’s the step right after figuring out what your brand is… which is actually a lot more complicated than it sounds. And all of this is a massive part of figuring out your target audience… which informs your content and platforms… see, it’s all connected.
There’s features that Facebook have that helps with customer comms too. They have a new feature for Frequently Asked Questions which I’m currently investigating. They also have an automatic response feature on their messages technology but I’m not a personal fan of this mainly because I prefer human connection rather than bots – but that’s just me.
Are you confident in your brand voice? Drop a comment below and let me know.
