This is from an answer to a listener question in Episode 14 of Hustleburg.
On your Facebook page, there is a rating of the time it takes you to respond to direct messages as a page on Facebook. Some of you have one that says “Typically responds within an hour.” This rating of the response time is most certainly a good thing, though many of you are unaware of how Facebook calculates your Messenger rating.
It’s Different For Different Businesses
The importance of this public-facing response time metric is going to be different for different businesses. If you’re in a fast-paced environment, where customers expect that you will respond quickly and you haven’t set the expectation that you don’t respond quickly. If, for example, you operate an auto repair business, and potential customers want to know if it’s possible to bring in their car for a repair that same day, you’re going to want to make sure you can reply to that person nearly immediately. Think of it like having someone available to answer the phone. For many introverts or others with social anxiety, messaging you on Facebook is going to be preferable to using the telephone.
If you’re not in a particularly fast-paced environment like the one above, your customers may appreciate, but not need, an immediate reply, you should operate the Facebook page messaging similar to your personal policy when it comes to texting with acquaintances. It’s not your significant other, your mom, or somebody that you would need to immediately reply to, so consider how swiftly you reply to text messages to friends and acquaintances that aren’t in your inner circle. If you reply swiftly to them, and can handle task-switching to answer a message and the ensuing back and forth, make it a priority to answer these type of messages that are coming in on your Facebook page via Messenger. The thing to think about with asynchronous communication is that every reasonable person realizes that you can’t possibly be doing what you do and responding to every inquiry that comes your way. While bigger businesses and brands will have more interaction, the labor that they allocate to accommodate this is going to be a little bit easier to manage than your typical small business.
Set Expectations
The most important thing to do here is to set expectations about how quickly you will respond, regardless of whether you are someone who is going to be able to respond quickly, if it’s going to take you some time to drag yourself away, or if you’re going to “batch” the answers to some of these inquiries. This is something that Facebook helps you to do by offering instant reply and away messages for your Facebook page. Instant replies are auto-responders, set by you to be an automatic reply to every received first message. Usually, these are used to outline a response timeframe, to thank community member for reaching out to your business, or to direct those messaging you to some resource you offer.
To help you maintain a positive public-facing response rate, you can also create an away message that is automatically sent to people who message your page when your page’s messaging status is set to away. You have two options here. The first of which is to set it to away outside of your hours of operation. Any messages that you receive outside of those certain hours will get the away message sent back to them. The other option is to manually set it on the page yourself, choosing to use the away messages when you are not actively engaged with some other task or away from the business and are going to be able to respond to those messages yourself. Regardless, both the automatic or instant reply and the away message need to set the expectation of what it’s going to be like for the person sending you a message in terms of how quickly you are going to respond to them going forward.
How Facebook Calculates Response Rate and Time
For those curious about how Facebook calculates this, they do so by measuring your response rate to private messages, all of the private messages to your page, measuring two things:
- The percentage of messages that you respond to
- The speed with which you do so
For the first, they require that you reply to 90% or greater to have a “Very Responsive” label on your page, no matter what the timeframe of your response is. Facebook calculates that your page’s response rate as the percentage of messages that you and other people who manage your page respond to messages received. They consider a message responded to only when it’s the first message a person sends your page after neither party has sent messages for at least 24 hours. Also, your page’s overall response rate is only based on messages received in a rolling 30-day period prior to the last message.
Facebook calculates your page’s response time to offer visitors an expectation of the amount of time it typically takes your page to respond to messages. Like the above, they calculate if it’s a response to the first message sent to your page after neither party has sent messages for at least 24 hours. Your page’s response time is the average of the fastest 90% of response times to messages received in the rolling 30-day period prior to the last message that counted toward your response rate. Your page “typically responds within minutes” to messages when your calculated response time is fewer than fifteen minutes.
If you need more information about the response rate and response time, Facebook has a lot of information in the Help Center.