What are the new UpVote and DownVote buttons on Facebook Pages Comments?

You may have noticed some recent changes to the comments section on your Facebook Business Page. We were able to help a local business today who was frustrated and confused about the new comment options, in particular the Upvote and DownVote Buttons that now show up on the right of your facebook page comments. 

One of the new changes is the introduction of Up-Vote & Down-Vote icons to the very right of all of your post comments on your page. (See screen-shot image below).  This option only shows up on Pages, not personal profiles and has caused a bit of confusion with facebook page owners 

Users in Australia and New Zealand will be the first to test out the new feature, which Facebook has said will “push those thoughtful and engaging comments to the top of the discussion thread”

 Before you panic about this new Vote for comments option- it is just a Trial option for Facebook business pages in Australia and New Zealand. The vote buttons were recently trialed in the US and now it is our turn. So let me explain what they do. Basically if you scroll over the buttons and select Vote Up (shown above) this will mean that you value this comment more than others and it will be moved to the top of the comments section by poll, depending on popularity. This is a handy option to feature the most helpful response etc and to move less useful ones or spammy ones towards the bottom, so when readers go to the comments section they can see the most relevant as before, but it is decided in a different way by users. It will be interesting to see how the trial goes and I haven't noticed a lot of users taking advantage of the vote options yet, but it will no doubt catch on. It is debatable if this will be miss-used however, rather than just pushing offensive comments down in a thread. 

It is not known how long the trial will go for - but why not test it out in the mean time and see how it benefits your profile. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Judi
Blue Bird Internet Marketing