Start More Conversations on Facebook by Doing Less!

You’ve got a lot to juggle day-to-day and I’m sure you don’t want to add Facebook Messenger to your list of to-dos, BUT WAIT! What if I told you Messenger could start conversations for you and respond with custom messages when you’re busy? In fact, play your cards right and Messenger might even start some conversations for you. Sound good? I promise, it’s extremely simple. 

Let’s jump into your Facebook Messenger settings… 

(Follow along by going to your Facebook Business Page, clicking “Settings” in the top right, and then “Messaging” on the right.) 

Prompt Visitors to Send Messages

The description from Facebook is a little vague on this one: “Page visitors may see prominent ways to start a message with you if you’re online or if your Page is very responsive to messages.” I’d suggest turning this on because there’s simply no downside. 

Help People Ask the Right Questions

Sometimes people don’t exactly know how to open a dialogue with you. Flip the switch on this setting and Messenger will suggest four FAQs that reflect your Page’s category. This screenshot is from the Back At You Media Facebook Page so the suggestions won’t be quite as relevant to you. (For the record, we don’t have a return policy on our social media marketing.) 

Instant Replies and Responsiveness 

Instant replies are fairly simple. If anyone sends you a message of any kind, Messenger will immediately reply with a message that you can customize. We don’t currently use this feature because it is instantly apparent that no one is “home” when it’s turned on. A genuine reply within five minutes feels more valuable to us than an instant, canned response, but do what feels right for you! 

As for your Page’s responsiveness, good news, you get to decide how responsive you are! We have ours set to “Typically replies within an hour” to make sure we’re setting realistic expectations and we’d suggest you do the same. If you can confidently say you’ll reply in minutes, that’s awesome, let visitors know how attentive you are with this responsiveness setting. Beware however, if you consistently fail to respond within minutes, Facebook will likely force you to change your responsiveness setting. 

Custom Away Message 

This “away message” is slightly different than the “instant reply” because you get to dictate the times when it’s sent and when it’s not (we’ll get to that in a second.) These custom messages are awesome because you can add personalization like the person’s first and last name, your Facebook Page’s URL, and your website URL. For example, you could set your away message to say something like, “Hi Grant, I’m away from the computer at the moment, probably showing clients the coolest homes in Santa Monica, but thank you so much for reaching out. I’ll shoot you a message back soon, but in the meantime, you can search for your dream home on my website: www.LAHomesForSale.com.” 

Here’s a look at the schedule portion of this feature. Just tell Messenger when to send your away message and when you’ll probably be available to answer for yourself. 

Your Messenger Greeting 

This one is pretty self-explanatory. When someone clicks to initiate a chat with you for the first time, you can write a little message to say hi, introduce yourself, etc. The dynamic personalization I mentioned early is also available here. 

There you go! That wasn’t so painful, was it? You didn’t have to program a bot, you just set it and forget it…until those messages start rolling in!