There are roughly 1.3 billion active users on Facebook messenger. Though many think of it as a packaged deal with Facebook, people (and marketers) are beginning to look at Messenger as its own social media platform that’s ripe for the taking.
Facebook Messenger marketing is increasing in popularity, as the platform allows you to target ads that will appear straight in the messenger app, in between regular user conversations. But when you run ads on Messenger, you can expect people to contact a business directly through the app, which presents a small issue: unless you can afford to have someone 24/7 to answer pressing questions, most requests may be left unread for a few hours. And users hate to wait.
The solution? The Messenger Chatbot.
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What Is the Messenger Chatbot?
The Messenger Chatbot is an automated messaging program that simulates a real conversation with users. These chatbots can interact directly with the consumer, answer their questions, provide links, gather information, and anything else you program them to do.
Chatbots aren’t exclusive to Facebook messenger. They are a customer service tactic recurrently used by marketers to help streamline the process of interacting with users. You may have come across web pages where a small window appears in the bottom right corner. That’s a chatbot asking if they could help you in any way.
A well-designed messaging bot can effectively engage your potential customers and bring them closer to the point where they convert, as they close the gap between the moment they ask a question or need help and the moment where someone from your marketing department is present to answer. Remember, consumers may view your ads and engage with you at all times. Even though they may realise a company representative may not be on the other side at the same time as them, they’d still prefer for their queries to be answered promptly.
The Benefits of a Live Chat Bot
These bots use Artificial Intelligence (AI), making them advanced enough to even mimic natural language. So, the person on the other side doesn’t necessarily feel like they are chatting with a robot, even though they are completely aware they are speaking to chatbots.
For businesses, these bots bring forwards a wide range of opportunities:
- Improved lead generation and nurturing
- Help build brand awareness
- Offer 24/7 customer support
- Save money on customer service costs
- Boost consumer engagement
- Improve customer satisfaction, which can ultimately lead to more conversions.
These benefits are present for all types of customer service chatbots, including those created for social networking sites. Luckily, building a bot for Facebook messenger is very easy. Here’s how to do it.
The Steps to Building a Bot
You don’t need extensive technical skills to build a live chatbot for Facebook or your website. Well, you would need that, if you wanted to create one from scratch all by yourself. But in 2020, there are a plethora of chatbot builders out there to help streamline the process. You can have Facebook messenger bots ready for launch in just a few simple steps.
Facebook also has some native tools for building a bot, but what they can do is very limited. You can streamline certain processes, like automatic bookings, but if you’re looking for the real deal to engage your target audience, then you need to use a third party chatbot builder.
To create your Facebook messenger bot, you’ll need a Facebook business page, and a builder like Chatfuel or Mobile Monkey. The actual steps to building a bot may differ slightly depending on the service you use, but in general, you can expect these components:
1. Create an Account and Link Your Page
Choose a chatbots building platform and create an account. Some may offer free trials for you to test out their services and see if you’re happy with how their bots act and what they can offer.
Then, you will need to link your Facebook business page and grant the service permission to access it.
2. Create the Chatbot
After you connect the page, you can start actually building your chatbot. No matter what service you choose, you can bet the process will be easy to navigate, as most of these chatbot builders require no coding experience to create chatbots.
Most likely, you’ll be asked to start with the welcome message. When a potential customer initiates a conversation with Facebook messenger bots, they are greeted with a short message that tells them what to expect. To enable this, you likely need to go back to your Facebook page and enable the “Show A Messenger Greeting” in your messaging settings.
In the message, you can greet the customer by using their name and provide additional info about what the chatbot will do. The simplest way to go about it is the “Hey, {FirstName}, how may I help?” Simple and effective, the user can take over from there.
3. Perfect the Chatbot
Then it’s time to teach the Facebook chatbots what to say, and what to do when they don’t know what to say. And you achieve it through:
Keywords that will trigger a particular response;
Setting a Default answer to use when no keyword is recognised and the chatbot doesn’t know what to reply.
This may take some time since you have to stop and think about what your potential customers may ask. But remember – the chatbot can learn and gather these tricky questions, which you can then add at any time to improve your service.
Over to You
Do you want to know how to start promoting your business on messaging apps?
Schedule a free 30-minute strategy session with our Facebook Marketing Agency experts now and let’s see what you can do to improve your Facebook marketing efforts to boost results.
