As we blogged a couple of weeks ago, brand pages with over 10,000 fans now have the option of turning on the Facebook Replies (or threaded comments) feature. Facebook plans to turn the service on by default for all pages with 10,000+ fans by 10 July 2013, so this is going to affect a large number of Facebook marketers very soon.
Facebook Replies: a summary
Previously, page owners or users were not able to reply directly to any single comment on Facebook, and new messages just went to the bottom of a chain of correspondence. This made it hard for readers to follow and did nothing for the brands' engagement with their customers. With Facebook Replies enabled, brands and Facebook users will have the ability to reply directly to comments left on page content and start conversation threads, making it easier for community managers to interact directly with individual readers and keep relevant conversations connected. It will also allow fans to talk to each other and the brand on a one-to-one basis, rather than one-to-many.
Facebook has also thrown something extra into the mix by showing the most active conversations at the top and any comments marked as spam are moved to the bottom (although users won't see the posts marked as spam). What is really important for moderators and community managers to note is that this means that not all content will be appear in chronological order.
How the Replies ranking system works:
For example, let's look at this conversation on a brand page:
You can see from the example above that the time stamps are in no particular order. But if you look at the top two comments they have risen to the top because they have been 'liked', automatically jumping to the front of the queue.
How threaded replies work
So now if you reply as the brand owner, the comment will appear directly underneath the user's comment.
Here's a further example of how the threaded conversations will appear on the front end of the page:
On a different brand's page, Reply has been used but they are not shown.
When you click on 2 Replies they drop down so everyone can see the conversation.
The brand has used Reply and the customer has replied to the reply.
How to monitor, moderate and manage Facebook Replies
If you are not using a Facebook management tool which has integrated the new API, then, although this change does dramatically improve how companies and customers can engage on the platform, trying to monitor a page for new content is an awful lot harder. Now new messages might be embedded anywhere in layers of conversation, rather than being at the bottom of a post.
Community managers and moderators will have to do a lot of careful scanning and will need to be extra vigilant on the Activity Log and Notifications tabs, as detailed below.
To see exactly when users are posting, you must use the Notifications, which will then show all comments from the users in strict chronological order: Click on 'See All'.
By clicking on the words Wall Post, Photo, Timeline, or Link, you can open the thread in a separate page. This will still bring up comments in non-chronological order but will help you focus on just that thread, and make it much easier to hand over between shifts.
Summary
So here's a reminder of how to moderate comments on a shift using Facebook's Activity Log and Notifications. In Activity Log - under Edit Page - check:
- All
- Spam
- Posts by others
In Notifications click 'See All' to the recent activity. If you click on the words Timeline, Photo, Wall Post, you can see what's been written by each user in chronological order.
When there are new items in either the activity log or notifications, a red number will show on the page to indicate that a user or users have done something on that page.
We'd be interested to hear what other community managers think of threaded replies and whether you think this helps improve the relationship between a user and a brand? Tell us how are you dealing with moderation if you don't use a third party tool?