Facebook has released new features for its Pages product to make it easier for SMEs to manage communication with customers.
Facebook announced yesterday there are now over 50 million businesses using Facebook Pages, and over 2.5 billion comments are posted on Pages every month.
"The number one challenge for small and medium businesses is reaching customers. Facebook Pages are the mobile solution for millions of businesses around the world, because they make it easy for business owners to reach new customers and communicate with current ones where they are - on mobile," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO.
The features allow Page owners to set the average time it takes for them to reply to messages: either "within minutes", "within an hour", "within hours" or "within a day". This gives customers a reasonable expectation of when they can hear back from the Page.
There is a redesigned Pages inbox, which gives businesses more information about their customers, to provide context. The full list of features can be found here.
"People can contact businesses any time and from any device, so we're offering new tools for Pages to better manage their customer interactions. Now it's easier than ever for Pages to address both the public comments and private messages that people send them, in order to build and maintain strong relationships and grow their business," says Pages product manager Michael Sharon.
Facebook says there are 120 million people on Facebook in Africa, with more than 80% using the service on mobile. This is 60% of the Internet population across the continent.
In SA, 61% of people on Facebook are connected to an SME.
Facebook has 31.5 million users in SA, Nigeria and Kenya, statistics released by the social network showed in September, with the majority using mobile devices to access their profiles.
Facebook opened its first African office in Johannesburg in June, as the continent's growing population and relatively low levels of Internet access present a large untapped market for the social network to earn advertising revenue.
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