If you have a facebook business page, I am guessing that you have struggled at some point with business page messages.  Facebook just doesn’t do a great job of tracking those and giving notifications for them when they come, they are hard to access, and most difficult of all, so many things come through my news feed in any given time that it is nearly impossible not to lose track of a message!

I like to respond to all emails and inquiries within 24 hours if at all possible, and much sooner if I can.  So after a long time of feeling like I was missing things, or answering too late because a message got buried in notifications, I looked into it a little further and found a very easy solution! In the end, I don’t want to use facebook messaging to communicate from my business page because I can’t attach big files to them to send info to potential clients, and they are hard to track as mentioned. So, I have a “instant reply” that sends out automatically to anyone who messages me, requesting that they email me instead!  That way it goes to my real inbox and I can address it from there!  It is so easy to set up too! Here is what you do:

1). Navigate to your Business  Page from facebook desktop

2). Click on “Messages” at the top

3). Click on “Settings”  on the upper right of your screen

4). Click on “Messaging” in the menu on the left

5). Scroll down and toggle “Send Instant Replies to anyone who messages your Page” to yes

6). Insert a message into the box there! If you want a sample, mine says:
“Hello! Thanks so much for contacting me, glad to hear from you! I really like facebook, but it’s notifications don’t often tell me when I get new messages, so please send this request to jill@jillgumphotography.com and I will get back to you asap!”

This has been such an easy life-saver for me! Since I put the message up 6 months ago, I have never once lost a message (or an inquiry for that matter!) from my page because they always email after seeing this! Those messages still do show as “unread” in my inbox so I go through occasionally and go through them all quick just to mark as read- but that is also a quick task!

I hope this is helpful! For other free tips for small businesses and photographers, click here!