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Good morning internet fans, Ryan Perry here, Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, September 23rd, therefore it is Social Media Wednesday. I have Sarah Giometti, who is broadcasting live from Hawaii, which means it’s about 6:45 in the morning right now. So, Sarah, I appreciate you, even though you’re on vacation in beautiful Hawaii, you actually woke up early to make sure that we can get this episode out, so good morning and thank you.

Sarah Giometti: Good morning and you’re welcome, it is a little early here.

RP: And if you’re wondering why she’s talking so quietly, it’s because she hasn’t had her coffee yet. That and she does have family members in the room… Not in the room per se, but…

SG: Yeah, in the condo.

RP: In the condo, yes. And we purposely chose those drapes to match your hair so you just kinda blend in, so right now it’s just like… It’s just a face and glasses.

SG: Well, last week I tried outside and the trucks were too loud, and so now this is really the only… This is it. This will have to do.

RP: Right. This is it. One of the nice things about the internet and what we do is that we can do our jobs wherever we want to, the downside is we can’t always control the area or the situation where we’re at, like we can when we’re back in the office. But again, I do appreciate you taking the time out of your vacation, and especially that early. I would have a hard time waking up that early to do a show. And speaking of show, we’re going to talk about the super duper, very responsive icon that I’ve never heard about on Facebook for business pages. And I haven’t heard a peep about this until you brought it up a couple weeks ago when we were trying to figure out our future episodes, so what exactly is this super responsive button? And does it really make a difference? Is it something we should be worried about?

SG: I don’t think it’s something we need to be worried, but it is something to be conscientious about as business owners who have Facebook pages. It is Facebook has created this green icon that if somebody visits your page and you happen to be a very responsive business in Facebook’s eyes, there will be a green icon telling them that you’re very responsive. The benefit of this is, especially if you sell something, a service or a product that somebody might need in an urgent matter and they go to your page and they see that you’re very responsive then they’re more likely to contact you over your competitors.

RP: Okay, and let’s just clarify what we mean by very responsive. This doesn’t mean that I post content on a responsive basis, or that if somebody leaves a message on a picture that I posted and I responded or liked that they left a message, we’re not talking about that correct?

SG: Correct. This is strictly with the Facebook messages. So if somebody sends you a private direct message on your Facebook page, if you respond to 90% of the messages within five minutes you get to turn on this very responsive green icon. And it’s also, it’s over the course of the seven days, and it’s a rolling seven days. So, the downside is if people don’t message you very often, you’re a smaller local business, they don’t message you very often on Facebook, you don’t really have the opportunity to turn that on. But if you do get messages on a fairly regular basis it is a good idea to respond as quickly as possible. Now, we all have businesses to run and that five minutes is crazy for most business owners, but there are things you can do to respond quickly without really have to respond. One of the biggest tips is Facebook does allow you to save custom canned messages. And so something you can do is go in real quick, send a canned message, something like, “Hey, thanks for contacting us. We’ll get back to you within X amount of time.” So something that gives you enough comfortable time to read the message, respond properly, but you’re also, in Facebook’s eyes, you are responding within that five minute period. And that way you can get that very responsive icon turned on, and it just gives you a leg up over the competition.

RP: Right. And I want to share a story, because again, I had never heard of this until you brought it up. So I did a little bit of research and one of the blog posts that I found, and in fact I’ll go ahead and throw it in the chat bar so people have it, was a girl who… And I’m trying to do a screen share, which is not going to work. But essentially what she did, she was… She’s like, “I forgot my youngest son’s birthday.” Her excuse was, “He’s the fourth child, so unfortunately the youngest gets forgotten about and I need a birthday cake.” And she went onto Facebook to find some recommendations, best birthday cake maker, baker. And sent a couple of messages out, liked some different pages and within five minutes she didn’t hear anything, she started getting a little freaked out. At 10 minutes she finally… Somebody responded to her. And the first person that responded was the person she started having communications with, ended up ordering the cake. Everything was perfect and she goes, “If I had known about this, or if this had been more prevalent I would have actually been looking for that icon because I needed a response really quickly, and if I knew that icon existed I would have gone to that business page first and started a conversation with them.”

RP: So for her it’s a higher level of credibility, and we kinda talked about… You brought up the fact that as small business owners you may not get a lot of messages through Facebook, so this isn’t really necessarily relevant to everybody. I can definitely see medium to large size businesses or if you’re in a high dense population, New York City, Los Angeles, some of the big cities where you might have more people communicating that way just because of the density of it. Like a florist as an example, somebody might have a question about flowers before they order something, I could see that being used.

SG: Right. And it also could be used, you said with the florist example, it could be used during primary time, events, typical events throughout the year. So, you can look at things like when there’s prom typically going on. You want to make sure you’re more responsive there. If you do weddings, wedding season, the holidays, those are all instances where you might get more interaction on Facebook from your community and you want to be more conscientious about responding quickly.

SG: The other thing, too, is if your target market tends to be on the younger side, they do tend to go to social media first to communicate with you. And so you also have to, if that is your target market, again be more conscientious to be responding in a timely manner and take advantage of saving those canned responses where maybe you get kind of the same questions over and over again, you can have a canned response saved where you just click a button and push it out and that way you’re not having to sit there and type it out or if you’re a business owner, you’re not in front of the computer and you’re getting the notification on your phone, you’re having to type it on your phone which can take a while, whereas the canned messages make it a lot easier. And like I said earlier, even if it’s a canned message that says, “Thank you for reaching out to us. We’ll get back to you within the next four hours.” it at least buys you a little bit of time and you’re technically responsive within the five-minute window.

RP: Right. Which is, and that brings us to a whole other question about the whole canned response things, but I think that’s a whole other show in the sense that it is social media, we still want that personal touch. And so you want to be careful with those canned responses. And some of the best ones are ones that people don’t necessarily know that are canned, trying to word it in such a way like, “Oh, I’m on the phone. I’ll get right back to you as soon as I get off.” something like that may, it’s still generic enough, but it makes people feel like, “Oh, you’re personally responding to me.” But, totally understand. It’s hard to juggle, especially if you’re on multiple social media accounts. The other things you need to make sure is that you have messaging turned on and that you actually get notifications. So, that’s something you’ll want to test also.

SG: Right. A lot of businesses, some pages have turned it off, and I definitely do not recommend it. You need to allow your customers and followers to reach out to you, because as the world is getting more and more social, they’re going to go to social media to reach out to you, send you a message, ’cause it’s easy. It’s way easier than trying to track down your website and go to the ‘contact us’ page and send an email to you when they’re already on Facebook or some other social media platform. It’s really easy for them to reach out to you as a business owner and send you a message there. And so, we’re only going to see that increase and you’re not going to get bombarded with bad emails. You’ll occasionally get a spam email. I see them pop up here and there on a business page, but it’s not an overwhelming thing to be a reason to have your messaging turned off.

SG: So, definitely go in to your basic settings, make sure your messaging is turned on, make sure notifications are turned on, and if you have the Facebook app on your phone, make sure your paging notifications push to your phone, ’cause that’ll help you get notified in real time, especially if you’re not sitting in front of a computer, you’ll get your page notifications in a timely manner and allow you to respond quickly. ‘Cause as Ryan said, you do want to watch out for the canned messages, but it is kind of a backup. If you don’t have time at the moment the message comes in, it is kind of that backup response. But if you do have time, if you can take the couple minutes to send an actual real response, always do that first. The canned message is just a backup.

RP: Right, and I’m trying to find, I’m actually on my phone right now, and there is a separate app. So you have your Facebook app, and then I have a separate app for all the business pages that I manage, and I cannot find this darn app. I was going to tell everybody what it is. I don’t know. If you happen to know what it is, by chance.

SG: Yeah. It’s just the pages app.

RP: Is it just called Pages, though?

SG: It’s Pages Manager. So, let’s see. If you can see my phone, I’m going to search. Let’s see. So, you can’t really see my icons. No.

RP: No.

SG: But it’s called ‘Pages Manager’.

RP: Yeah. So, that would be a separate application that you’d want to download because what I… I always get notifications on my phone, but it doesn’t come through my Facebook personal page application. It comes through the business page app. And I don’t know why I can’t find the stupid app, and it’s not one of those things. I don’t have to have the app running. I just need to have it installed, make sure I have all my pages on it so that if somebody does try, or when somebody sends me a message, I do get a notification. I’m not sure how fast they push it. I would assume it’s pretty instantaneous, though.

SG: Yeah. It’s pretty close to real time ’cause I got, yeah, I’ve got it on there with all the pages that I manage. So, it does push pretty real time to your phone to your notifications. And it pushes your notifications for comments, messages, and reviews. So, if somebody reviews your business, it pushes that so you can take a look at what the review is as well.

RP: Right.

SG: And so it is a hand app to have. Even if you are only managing one page, it’s not a bad thing to have it on there so you get all the push notifications. But you can also, if you don’t have it installed, you can get the notifications with the regular app as well.

RP: Oh, can you?

SG: Yeah, have pop up… I used to have them pop up in both places.

RP: Okay.

SG: But it is a handy separate app to have, because then you’re just… The other reason to have it is if you’re in the Pages Manager app, you’re most likely… It defaults to commenting and interacting as the page, so you don’t have… If you’ve never done the mix-up in the past of posting something to the page, and go, “Oh shoot, it’s me, not the page.” And you have to delete it, you have to repost it. And so doing it through the pages app eliminates all those mistakes and so it actually can save you time, so that you’re not accidentally posting as you, not the page.

RP: Alright. Okay, well perfect. So, quick recap for probably, I’m guessing, 95% of the business out there, this is probably not going to be relevant to you. However, this is something you need to be aware of, because if you are in that 5% and you are getting messages, this is a real easy way to separate yourself from your competition. So the key thing is, you need to make sure you have the messaging service turned on, and so you’d have to go into your business page and settings and make sure that’s turned on. Number two, it’s rolling seven day and what are the qualifications?

SG: You have to respond to 90% of the messages within a five-minute period. And so even if you aren’t getting a ton of messages, even if you’re in that 95% who’s not getting a ton of messages, it’s still a really good habit to get into to respond fast, so that as your business grows, as the messages grows, you’re already in the habit of responding quickly and your more likely to turn that icon on as messages come in. ‘Cause even if you get one a week, if you respond to it quickly, they’ll turn it on at least for that seven-day period.

RP: Alright, okay, perfect. So, that’s it for today’s episode regarding the super responsive little icon that you can get on your Facebook page. Next week, we’re going to talk about Five Myths of Facebook Advertising. I think advertising on Facebook is great these days, simply because it’s so inexpensive and we really don’t know how long it’s going to stay inexpensive, so it’s something if you’re interested in dabbling in, you’ll definately want to check out next week’s episode. Sarah, I think next week you’re going to be stateside, correct?

SG: That is correct. I come home before that, so I’ll be back in my office in my normal backdrop.

RP: It’s going to be so sad, so sad, not in Hawaii anymore.

SG: I know.

RP: I guess they say, “All good things must come to an end.” And with that, this episode has come to an end. Sarah, as always, I appreciate your time and everybody out there, we will see yeah next week, where we’re going to talk about Five Myths to Facebook Advertising.