You’ve worked hard on your business’s Facebook page and customers regularly leave comments awaiting your reply. But you can’t always respond immediately to every comment. What can you do?
Soon, it seems, you will be able to use a new feature being tested—“Facebook Saved Replies.” These are designed to enable you and your Page administrators (employees who are given the right to manage your Page, including using this and other tools) to write, save, and use “placeholder” messages to communicate with your customers on Facebook.
Facebook Saved Replies is positioned as a way to save business owners and their Page admins time by quickening initial response time to comments left on your company’s Page by customers or potential customers.
You and your Page admins create a basic reply that can later be posted as needed on your company’s Facebook Page.
Major brands typically use help-desk solutions such as Kayako, Zendesk, and Freshdesk. These platforms typically charge a fee and will assist client brands by managing all of their social media accounts.
Facebook’s Saved Replies option is poised to provide small businesses an inexpensive solution to the problem of responding swiftly to the most important people to your business—your clients and potential clients. Saved Replies are placeholders similar to form-email messages companies typically send in reply to emails they receive from customers.
You can then go into Facebook when you have the time to craft a more complete reply to an inquiry.
Facebook Saved Replies is available now to a select group of businesses via the Facebook Page messaging interface. Page admins can create a variety of placeholder replies, save them, then choose the one from the list most suitable to a particular comment.
Businesses are also offered sample replies they can use or customize. After the basic Page Reply tool setup is completed, the admin then simply chooses a Saved Reply from a list and clicks on it. It will automatically appear as a reply to the comment. The Saved Replies list is also available in the message box in the form of a new icon that you click on.
Facebook Saved Replies can be personalized to feature the name of the person who left the message, as well as the admin’s name and your company’s website URL.
Saved Replies appears to be in limited testing right now. Facebook generally limits the release of new features or products, giving access to them to a select audience. Usually after an initial test phase, the feature is rolled out to all users.
At least, that’s how the Call to Action button was introduced.