Facebook rolls out private messages for Pages

December 20, 2011 | Online Marketing

The world's largest social network has begun rolling out functionality that allows Page owners and individual Facebook users to exchange private messages. Unliike Twitter, Facebook is requiring that the individual initiate the conversation for now at least.

For brands, social media was supposed to open the door to one-to-one engagement with customers, but in practice, it has for many become primarily a one-to-many marketing platform.

The reason is simple: when you have a few hundred thousand followers on Twitter or a few million fans on Facebook, it's far easier to market to consumers than it is to communicate with them. Facebook may be looking to change that slightly, however.

As TheNextWeb notes, this new functionality opens the door to "a greater level of customer service on Facebook". While social media is often more of a marketing platform than a tool for one-on-one communication, more than a few brands are using social media as a customer service channel (or quasi-customer service channel). Now those brands will have an opportunity to do more on Facebook.

Get the full story at The Next Web

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