Facebook Updates for Business Pages so far in 2015

17th June 2015

17th July 2015

If you use Facebook in any way regularly, you’ll already know that Facebook rolls out regular updates. There have been quite a few lately that are relevant to Facebook business pages, so I thought I’d share some here.

Facebook Updates for Business Pages so far in 2015

See First

Fans can now opt to see updates from business pages at the top of their Newsfeed. Obviously this would be great if your fans opted in for this. I guess this would be even more effective at reaching fans then 'Get Notifications'.

Fans of your page can click on the Like button (after they have already liked your page, and then can choose 'See First':

To check your settings for your own Newsfeed News Feed Preferences, whether on your desktop or mobile device.

... And from there, you can manage your settings:
Like or Comment as Your Facebook Page while logged in as your Personal Account

Here’s an example of what I saw in the Facebook feed of my personal profile at the start of June:

Note where it says "Like or comment as one of the Pages you manage", towards the bottom right hand corner - although I'm logged in as my personal account, I can post on my business page from my Personal Account's Newsfeed.
Responsive to Messages

The idea behind this is that Facebook wants to motivate Businesses to provide faster response time. If normal internet users figure out that they'll get a quicker response from you via Facebook than email - then they'll use Facebook more, right?!

If you're logged in as an Admin, you may see something like this on the left hand side of your screen (on desktop):

- that is only visible to Page Admins. There is an icon that is visible to the public, that looks like this:

How do you get the Very Responsive Icon? Well - if you manage to get a response time of quicker than 5 minutes for 90% of the messages - which seems to me to be an incredibly high standard. If you see any pages with this icon, please post the link in the comments below this article, as I haven't been able to find any examples!
Saved Replies

When someone sends a private message to your page, you can now set up 'Saved Replies'. This is not the same an autoresponder. It's simply a pre-composed message that you can personalise slightly (e.g with the name of the logged-in Admin, or the name of the sender).

Click 'Personalised' to automatically include the sender's name in your reply:

I don't really think this is very useful unless your page has a massive amount of enquries about the same thing. Otherwise it would make more sense to respond individually - as a real 'live' person.

However Business Pages with a load of followers may find they are getting a lot of spam in their inbox - in that case, it might be clever to create a Saved Reply, just to reply to the spam accounts, in order to improve the 'Response Rate'.
Call-to-Action Button

The Call-to-Action button appears under the Cover Photo on on mobiles, or towards the bottom of the Cover Photo on Desktops:

If you don't already have the Call-to-Action button set up, look for this on your cover photo:

It's pretty easy to set up - you can link to whatever you want. However it's pretty restrictive in terms of the text, you can only have one of the following;
- Book Now
- Contact Us
- Use App
- Play Game
- Shop Now
- Sign Up
- Watch Video
Add What You're Doing or How You're Feeling

You may have noticed this on person profiles - well, busineses can have personalities too. This ties in with the idea that Business Pages should also give away some of their personality - i.e. don't be a Facebook business, that people can't emotionally connect with.

Here's an example from a Post from Zonua's Facebook page from mid June:

Note: This seems to be glitchy - e.g. I put in one emotion, and it chooses another - and you can't edit it once it's been posted.

Thanks for reading, Zonua is over on Facebook here.

Hi, I'm Dorcas. I make websites. I lecture in Digital Marketing and related stuff in the UCD Smurfit School. I do consultancy. I do talks. I've written a book on WordPress (available here).