Facebook rolled out new threaded replies to pages yesterday.
This allows page admins to reply to individual comments from fans on a post and create threaded conversations.
Additionally, they’ll be pushing out active-thread sifting – a feature that orders the most active conversations on a post to the top of the post.
Pages with more than 10,000 fans will have the option of turning this setting on starting Monday, but in July it will automatically be pushed to all pages.
It will not work on mobile yet but the plan is to roll it out in the future. Below is an example of what this looks like from Tim Tebow’s Facebook page:
Why this is important:
Brands will not be able to ignore active conversation on their pages as this puts fan activity front and center on the page.
The factors that determine whether or not a post is seen include the number of likes on a given reply as well as whether or not a site visitor has friends interacting in that thread.
It raises the importance of a strong community management program for monitoring and responding to fan inquiries and discussion.
This will be helpful for customer service programs as individual users can be replied to from the page. Since an active conversation rises to the top, and a negative conversation could be an active conversation, it’ll be more important for brands to engage with their fans on pages and respond.
The option to thread conversations also opens up the ability to run live Q&As (a la Reddit’s AMAs) on a brand Facebook page or move some functionality from user forums to the page.