Conversations initiated through customer matching will include a final opt-in upon the first Facebook Messenger communication. If you have phone numbers for customers and pre-existing permission to reach out to them, you can find them on Facebook Messenger via customer matching. When someone clicks that link - regardless of where they are - it will open a conversation with your business in Messenger. If you've created a Page for your business on Facebook, Messenger Links will use your Page’s username to create a short link (m.me/username). Here are a few tools and updates they've released to help simplify that connection: Messenger Links Facebook is trying to make that easier for businesses and organizations as well. But, as with any new pathway into your company, you're likely to find that adoption of this communication channel within your customer base won't happen without some promotion. Users are able to search for companies and bots inside Facebook Messenger by name, so you'll probably get some users that way. So, now comes the classic marketer question: If you build it, will they come? How People Find Bots in Facebook Messenger Natural language interface is common in most chatbots, but by opening up the Messenger Platform and providing developer tools like the bot engine, Facebook has made building an intelligent bot easier. You've undoubtedly heard of artificial intelligence (AI). In other words, your bot could get "smarter" with each interaction. You can read more on this here, but in short, this means that not only can bots parse and understand conversational language, but they can also learn from it. What's special about the bots you can build on Facebook Messenger is that they're created using Facebook's Wit.ai Bot Engine, which can turn natural language into structured data. Chatbots, which anyone can now build into Facebook Messenger, automate conversation - at least the beginning stages of it.
"Bot" is a generalized term used to describe any software that automates a task. In other words, building into the already popular Facebook Messenger app could enable businesses to get in front of customers without that added friction.Īt least, that's the potential.
And as marketers, we have an exciting opportunity to help shape it.Īs Zuckerberg put it in his keynote, "No one wants to have to install a new app for every business or service they want to interact with.” And bots are much different than disjointed apps.
But what comes next is entirely undefined. So the early excitement, well, it's justified. We're talking about active users who have adopted Messenger as a primary communication channel.Īnytime a company as forward-looking as Facebook opens up a platform as heavily adopted as Messenger it should raise eyebrows.
Not people who got forced to download it when Facebook spun it out of the standard Facebook app. Why all the ardor? For starters, Facebook Messenger already has about 1.3 billion monthly active users worldwide. Thousands of articles were penned about the news, each one speculating on what an open Messenger platform could mean for businesses' customer service teams. In the days following the announcement, the tech and marketing space lost its mind. Back in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook's Messenger Platform - a new service that enables businesses of all sizes to build custom bots in Messenger.