Bots in Facebook Messenger are a subject of hot debate lately. Why all the fuzz? For starters, Facebook Messenger now has around 1.3 billion daily active users world wide. Not just registrants; not those who just got forced to install it after Facebook spun it off from the normal Facebook application.
To go along with this, Facebook Messenger also integrates with other third-party apps, like the Facebook plugins for WordPress, Twitter, and many others. With these integration, the webhook URL that Facebook sets up when you sign up for your account becomes a link to your Facebook profile page. From there, anyone can log into your account and chat with you. You can reply to conversations, create groups, comment on photos and notes, etc. Basically anything you’d do on a regular Facebook site is possible on a Messenger bot, and probably more!
Bots in Facebook Messenger aren’t limited to messaging only, though. You can also use your Bot to browse through feeds from your favorite websites and let the Bot follow links you click on. Say you love The New York Times. When you set up your facebook messenger bot to search for The New York Times among all the other news bots on facebook, your Bot will search through all of them, and return a list of headlines you may be interested in. This functionality is currently only available for a handful of apps (out of hundreds) but is promises to expand over time.
Bots in Facebook Messenger also let you send mass messages to a single contact. Again, like the discussion feature, each bot can handle multiple conversations at once. You can have multiple conversations going at once with high-quality voice commands, so that no one accidentally gets stuck in the middle of a message. You can even change the voice of your Bot in real time! Bots in Facebook Messenger also make it easy for you to reach high-quality potential customers.
According to comScore, a digital marketing company, there are approximately 1.3billion users of Facebook, making it one of the largest sites on the internet. It’s free to sign up, and has no cost at all. With this huge user base, and the potential to reach everyone, marketers are excited to create Facebook applications ( Bots) that will sell to this large audience. But how do you get potential customers to your application? Do you offer some sort of gift? Can you find customers by email address or zip code?
There are two main approaches to using Facebook Bot in order to attract new customers. The first strategy is called “face-to-face” sales. Here, you simply set up a webcam so that you can chat with someone, and then follow up with them by email. Bots in Facebook Messenger can help you follow up on messages and make sure you have all your bases covered. The second strategy is called “bot-to-bot” sales. This is where a Bot acts as an automated messaging system to contact leads on your behalf.
In both cases, a Bot acts just like an actual person would in real life. In addition to being able to verbally contact another user, a Bot can send them information by facetime or by sending a message to another person’s wall. With detailed conversations, you can establish long-term customer relationships – as well as initiate communication that can lead to sales. Bots in Facebook Messenger can make this process easy for you by helping you schedule conversations that lead to sales.
So there are a number of ways to use Facebook Bot for business purposes – including chat bots for sales, which make communicating with customers easy and sales more efficient. Facebook has yet to announce any plans to integrate chat bots into their other apps, but it won’t be long before we learn of new applications from Facebook. The first steps to creating a bot are to create a Facebook account and an app, then install a Facebook Messenger Bot on your website. You may even want to start a bot for your business right now!