Facebook has added a new interactive “send message” feature to ads posted by local businesses allowing users to communicate directly with the business. Businesses in turn will have the ability to send a private message to whoever posts a comment on their Facebook page. Previously, they could only do so if the user sent a message first.

Facebook’s new ad interface was added to encourage small and medium-sized businesses to use their social network to invest in outreach to their customer base. Staying consistent with their advertised monitoring of social activity, Facebook will advertise a “very responsive” indicator on the pages of those who respond to at least 90% of the feeds within five minutes. This data will also be viewable in users’ page administrator controls. (Fortune article here).

And being aware of the heavily contingent response rate, Facebook has provided businesses with template responses and other bulk actions.

Facebook is following their effort on the heels of Yelp and Google who have rolled out similar social interactive tools for small enterprises to engage with their audiences. In addition, Facebook opened up its messaging app to brands a few months ago.