Facebook unveils live-streaming, private responses to page comments

The first will be of note to any page managers that are tasked with replying to comments on their brand page. Previously, any replies to user comments were public. Facebook is now offering the option to take the conversation out of a public forum and into a private message.

My first thought was that this feature is great, but if others come to the page and see that questions aren’t being answered, that could pose a problem. Facebook addressed that very issue. MarketingLand reports:

To encourage the platform’s use for customer service, Facebook has created a new way to signal that a company is responsive, a badge stating that a Page is “Very responsive to messages.” Pages will receive the badge if they respond to 90 percent of messages and have a median response time of less than five minutes. Responsiveness stats will be based on data from the last seven days and admins will be able to view their Pages stats in Insights.

The other feature Facebook unveiled takes direct aim at Meerkat and Periscope, live-streaming apps that sizzled at the beginning of this year with a huge uptick in adoption, and then fizzed to become of interest to only a handful of users.