Facebook is rolling out a 'new' feature: "Reply" and subsequent conversation ranking. Essentially you can reply to comments and they will show up as replies indented to signify a conversation taking place. The conversations with the busiest amount of replies will sort from top to bottom on the post.
What's the significance of all of this: It's a simple (and effective) tactic to increase overall FB engagement, spark more conversation, and give all the social chatterboxes out there more ability to start and lead conversations. It's a good thing in general: It means comments will not just sit out there alone anymore, attached to a name or person as the commenter indicates. Instead now you can have more of a Reddit like experience and hopefully spark individual conversations within a post
For fan page managers this means a couple of important things: 1 - You can expect the conversation to change, twist, pivot and go places you hadn't previously expected. This comes with a good deal more potential for problems for big brands who want to control what is said in the presence of their brand, and could therefore create a significant amount of additional moderation work for community managers. On the other hand it allows people to pick up on interesting ideas and run with them (VP's of social be kind to your community managers this month) but it also means more engagement which is a big positive for your page. 2 - It means you will need to test how this all works by probably toning down your posting strategy a bit. If you've just started to get comfortable with a little more of an edgy posting strategy it might be a good idea to tone it down a bit now and see how the conversations flow. Given the opportunity for a true conversation thread to emerge you may see a lot more 'personalities' evolve (erupt) on your page that may want to steer conversations in directions that stroke their ego... something close to a troll but probably not full on trolling.
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