Facebook is testing a new feature that allows the administrators of Facebook Pages accounts — i.e., Facebook accounts reserved for public figures and organizations — to receive and reply to private messages from users, the social network confirmed to TPM on Monday.
A Facebook PR spokesperson provided TPM with the following statement: “We are currently testing a feature that allows people and Pages to communicate privately. We have no further details to share at this time, as it is still a test.”
The confirmation follows the news, originally broken by The Next Web, that private messaging for Facebook Pages was currently being rolled out to some administrators in Asia.
According to The Next Web, the messages “must be initiated by the customer.” At that point, the business can reply as in the case of normal Facebook messaging between users.
This may be a savvy preventative measure on the part of Facebook, prohibiting businesses from annoying users with unsolicited private messages.
As PC World‘s Brennon Slattery put it: “Thankfully, businesses cannot instigate the ninth circle of Spam Hell by sending unsolicited messages to consumers.”
Yet as Slattery also notes, the feature also appears to allow Facebook admins to privately respond to users’ public posts on the Facebook Page Wall.
The Next Web obtained screenshots of the new feature from an Asia-based admin’s account, showing a new “Message” button that appears in the upper-right hand corner of a Facebook Page. The feature is presented along with a message allowing admins to “opt out” of it entirely by navigating to their settings and unchecking a box.
Although Facebook has offered separate Pages for organizations since November 2007, it would be remiss not to note that the move to create a private channel of communication for said organizations and users comes on the heels of Google’s recent introduction of new Google Plus Pages for organizations in November and Twitter’s redesigned Brand Pages, unveiled on December 8.
Both Google Plus Pages and Twitter Brand Pages allow for more direct, private communication between organizations and individual users.
In the case of Google Plus Pages, that communication is facilitated by Google Plus’s Circles feature, which allows for an easy, visually-intuitive grouping of followers into separate groups. Messages can then be restricted to certain Circles.
In the case of Twitter, businesses have from the get-go been able to communicate privately with users using Twitter’s Direct Message feature, although, as we saw in one highly unfortunate case this year, it is easy to accidentally mistake a Direct Message with a Public Tweet.
More to the point, all three social networks are attempting to court companies that have advertising dollars to spend as the social media wars heat up. Giving organizations the ability to communicate directly with users would seem to fall in line with this overall push.
However, it is also worth pointing out that all three sites were of course preceded in their efforts to cater pages specifically for businesses by the fallen giant of the social networking world: MySpace. In fact, some writers have argued that it is precisely because MySpace opened itself up so fully to businesses, without effective spam controls, that it began driving away users to then-upstart competitor Facebook.
Whether Facebook, or any of its current crop of competitors, eventually goes down this route remains to be seen. But the point remains: Catering to businesses is a tight-rope for social media companies.
