There are tons of blogs available online that advise companies about the importance of responding quickly on Social Media. Well, if that doesn’t convince you, we have seen enough social media disasters to know its importance. Whether it was the recent online fiasco of Air India’s insensitive management of its customers, followed by online shaming or the famous case of HCL employee who received an appointment letter 3 years late, tardiness in responding online is the biggest crime an organization can commit in the social media world today.

Most of these encounters were made viral majorly through twitter which were then amplified over other social media networks like Facebook. But nobody can deny Facebook’s impact in this area. And so Facebook has launched a new feature today to help organizations understand their own responsiveness.

Facebook has started a rating mechanism to identify the responsiveness of the page. It is shown as an additional icon that appears right below the profile picture in the left hand corner of the page and states the page’s current responding time.

How does Facebook judge a page’s responding time?

Facebook takes into account two things to rate the page-

Percentage of messages responded to.

Time taken in responding.

This is how Facebook shows the response time-

If the page is highly responsive, Facebook starts showing a ‘Very Responsive To Messages’ icon on the page which is visible to the public. The icon appears as-

But how do you achieve this icon? According to Facebook, it is required that the page-

Responds to 90% of the messages and

Maintains a median response time of 5 minutes for all replies sent

When the page has this icon, it automatically becomes visible to the public. Until then, the responsiveness of the page is only visible to the page admins and other managers.

But what if you have not allowed people to contact the page? Then, this feature is unavailable for you and Facebook will continue to show the panel as it used to-

With the launch of this new feature, social media agencies now have a way to judge their performance with respect to their average response time. If the green icon is not present, then it is a clear indicator that agencies need to work on that. On the other hand, for brands it is a tangible indicator of how responsive their brand is on social media.

At Solomo Media, we are pretty much obsessive about this as we understand that Social Customer Care can make or break a brand. Timely, personal and humanized response is something which win the hearts of users, current and prospective. This approach has always helped our brands connect with their customers and present a pro-active brand persona and thank god now there is a good measurable metric for that!

You can read more about this new feature on Facebook’s help center.

[Update] I think Facebook has realized that 5 minutes is a really difficult target for many page owners and so they have introduced a new feature to facilitate the responsiveness feature. Here’s what you can do-

Whenever you are out of town, going to sleep, traveling on a plane or just not available, turn on the “Show status as away “ When people message you during this time, the unread messages won’t contribute in the calculation of your responsiveness rate. The default time is set for 12 hours. You can turn it off if you are available before that or turn it back again if you need to remain unavailable for a longer time.

This makes more sense Facebook Good work! 🙂