By bbr

by Sarah Warlick, copywriter and editor

Finally, users can respond to individual comments on your accounting firm’s Facebook Page! It may seem like a small change, but for frequent social media users the lack of threading has been a longstanding irritant. It left perfectly sensible responses looking like non sequiturs because intervening replies had distanced them from the comment to which they referred. This may or may not have been the bane of your existence, but the added feature does make for a more logical conversation.

Unlike many social media sites, up until now when you responded to a post on Facebook your only option was to make a single reply that followed all others made before yours. This often caused the response to end up looking nonsensical or insensitive. If users didn’t find the post at exactly the right moment, they either had to run that risk or figure that they missed their chance and refrain from making a response. Out of context comments were also likely to be overlooked in lengthy conversations.

Threading allows you to respond to a particular comment, even if other viewers have added 3 (or 30 or 300) additional comments following the one that interests you. The result is a conversation that makes sense to others who come across it, even hours or days later. Increased engagement is the consequence, since topics worthy of extended exploration are suitable for input for a greatly extended time period. There’s also less chance that you’ll miss a good comment or accidentally ignore a question from a client since it can now be positioned directly after the post that inspired it.

Brands that seek to create meaningful conversations on their Facebook pages should welcome this change, and one more. Along with the threaded comments, Facebook is now using the level of engagement to determine position for comments. That means that the posts garnering the greatest response will appear near the top of the page. Active conversations will be easy to see and thus invite more participation.

For the time being, threading is only available to pages, not personal profiles, and only automatic for brands with over 10,000 followers. If you’d like to enable it on your firm’s page, go to the Manage Permissions section of your page admin panel and opt in. If you do it, please let us know if you see an effect. Does the long-awaited ability to make threaded comments increase engagement on your page? Is it indeed easier to find things?