elaineAfter months of testing which began late last year, Facebook is now ready to launch a new feature that will allow its users to reply directly to comments left on their page.
In a blog post written by Facebook Journalism Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik, the company said their new comments feature is designed to “improve conversations.”
Image courtesy of Facebook
The Reply feature will allow a user to leave a response on an individual comment by clicking on the ‘Reply’ button underneath each comment. Previously one will only find the ‘Like’ button there.
Users will no longer have trouble finding their friends’ response to their comments, or ‘tagging’ a friend in a comment. Responses will be posted orderly under the original comment.
“You and your readers will have the ability to reply directly to comments left on your Page content and start conversation threads, which will make it easier for you to interact directly with individual readers and keep relevant conversations connected,” said Lavrusik. “Also, the most active and engaging conversations among your readers will be surfaced at the top of your posts ensuring that people who visit your Page will see the best conversations.”
Conversations will also be ranked based on its activity, for instance, the comment which is getting the higher number of replies will be pushed higher up in the thread.
According to Facebook, the conversation threads will be ordered by relevance to viewers and may appear differently to users based on their connections. The criteria for determining relevance would be based on the following:
– The number of positive feedback based on the total number of Likes and Replies in a conversation thread, including those of the page owner.
– The connection to the participants in the thread, for instance comments left by Friends may appear at the top
– The total number of negative feedback including those marked as spam by the page owner
The Reply feature will be automatically turned on for profiles with more than 10,000 followers, and all Pages will have the feature enabled by July 10, 2013. For now the feature is also only available on desktop but Facebook plans to make it available for Graph API and mobile in the future.
Originally posted at Social Broadcast Network