Facebook's Response Rate System

By Adam  |  26 Aug 2015 08:00:00

A new feature that has been popping up on Facebook business pages over the last few months is the 'Response Rate' ranking. This is directly tied to the way that you use that page to interact with other people; if, for example, a customer sent in a question and you sent them a reply instantly, it would list you as getting back to people within a few minutes 100% of the time. This new addition is both good and bad and I'm going to go over its strengths and weaknesses in this blog post. As it is still a somewhat new system, hopefully that means that the flaws will have been worked out before too long!

Firstly, the strengths. If you are very speedy with replying to your customers that's good and it's nice that Facebook is now letting people know about businesses which do that. A potential customer might have a question about your business which they feel needs to be answered before they'll make any kind of purchase from you. If this hypothetical person then sees on Facebook that you reply to your messages very quickly, they might then send the question to your Facebook page, which you can be speedily reply to. Furthermore, it will be a good indication, to new customers, that you are a reliable and trustworthy business, if they can see a high Response Rate.

On the other hand, it is temperamental and has its flaws. Sometimes the Response Rate doesn't even show up! But the biggest problem is that it does not really take spam messages into account. Every business will get spam messages and there's no real reason that you should reply to them... That is, other than this new artificial reason that is maintaining your Response Rate. Do you want to reply to spam to keep your Response Rate high? Is it worth the risk of encouraging spammers? It's your decision to make and, hopefully, Facebook will eventually iron out this flaw.

So I hope that gives you something to keep in mind with your Facebook marketing! If you can't see your Response Rate yet then maybe it hasn't yet been added to your page. It is a new feature and I wouldn't worry too much about it, but do be conscious of it. But if you haven't even started your eCommerce business yet, why not sign up to Sellr now? You can make an eCommerce dream an eCommerce reality without spending a thing.