Navigating Changes at Facebook

If you have woven Facebook into the menu of social media platforms you use to engage existing customers and attract new ones, you’ve noticed their somewhat annoying trend of endless alterations to both policy and offerings. The Mother of All social media networks, Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, a social media monopoly. That won’t be changing any time soon.

No one feels sorry for them, but it’s fair to acknowledge that Facebook executives who need to continually balance the need for revenues while keeping users happy face their share of challenges. And for an online platform that is now regulated by Federal and state entities because of its heavy volume of political content, it creates an ongoing need to shift gears.
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In 2011, Facebook started forwarding only critical notifications through email, so as to cut down on high-volume inbox flooding. Photo tags, security, payment, and privacy notifications made the cut. Business owners who are accustomed to a high volume of email communications, but not having to access Facebook several times per day, will have made that adjustment.

Now there’s a new revision that business users need to be aware of. Beginning March 4, 2020, access to supported “Message Tags” after the standard 24-hour window (following the last customer contact) whittled down from 17 supported tags to three, plus an additional tag in beta. Message Tags facilitate one-to-one interactions with customers, including updates, customer service questions, promotions, and pretty much anything relative to your customer relationship.
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With that pathway narrowing, it’s critical to build in adjustments that will maintain your presence on Facebook and keep you in good standing with the platform. In order to bypass the allowed 24-hour period, you must use these remaining tags with your messaging.

Here are the tags still supported following that 24-hour time frame:

• Confirmed event reminder
  These are upcoming events or appointments that your users or customers have RSVPd to. They include reminders for online courses through Facebook Live. No replay message is allowed beyond the 24-hour window.
  
  
• Post-purchase update
  You may confirm transactions by sending invoices or receipts, notify customers of shipment statuses, and work out customers’ requests for changes. Notification of a credit card decline, a backordered status, and other pertinent order messaging are still okay after 24 hours.
  
  
• Account update
  If you need to notify a customer about a change in application status, or suspicious activity including fraud alerts, any time is fine. But no sneaking in promotional content using these parameters. And no surveys, or request for reviews.
  
  
• Human agent
  It’s a closed beta for now, open only to Facebook engineers and testers. Look for future updates.

 
It’s not all bad
As with many Facebook functions, the above restrictions may be waived by users/customers changing their own notification settings. It wouldn’t hurt to instruct them of this option at some point.

If you use a third-party platform to enable chat bots, you will need to look over their flows, and apply the appropriate Message Tag to any Facebook message that may be sent outside the 24-hour window. Without a Message Tag, the message will not be forwarded.

The workaround for possible interruptions related to this new policy is simple. Compile a list of contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses. This will open up access to your customers independent of Facebook. It sounds backwards – after all, wasn’t social media supposed to facilitate convenience? – but in the long run, it’s never a bad idea to prepare for the worst.
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For a complete explanation on this new policy, see Facebook’s instruction page designed for developers.