Blazing the Path Through the Jungles of Facebook Messenger Bots
Companies are starting to invest in chatbots. Many brands have already deployed messenger bots. I believe year 2017 is the year of conversational interactions take off. What is a Facebook chatbot? Facebook Messenger bots will help users to interact with a company or service over Facebook Messenger in natural language (NLP).
Many companies think bots are the next big thing and Facebook wants to make money off of chatbots. If Facebook developers continue to improve them, sponsored ads feels more like a conversational sales pitch. These bots are communication platform for businesses and customers. They interpret the intent from natural language processing (NLP) and what users have earlier searched on Facebook.
Although it’s pitched as a “natural language” communication, the reality is that the chatbot only understands certain phrases. These bots learn over time and they are imperfect. For businesses, using chatbots is an important step to remaining competitive in the next iteration of online marketing. These chatbots can automate tasks which traditionally performed by humans through a simple user interface. You can create some features in your Facebook Messenger platform, and continually improve it. It’s different from having an app, which requires users to download the update; you can just update them on your end.
Should You Focus on Facebook Chatbots for Your Business?
Chatbots are good for messaging apps, similar to how app stores have developed into their moneymaking systems. American companies in the U.S can implement certain native elements into their Facebook chatbots such as: Facebook payment functionality and get the receipt via Facebook receipt messenger bot. This is more useful for ecommerce owners. You can also embed sticker based on what users send you earlier.
How Facebook will generate income through these chatbots? Facebook wants you to run Pay Per Click ads on their platform, and these bots will get businesses to run more facebook advertisements. This means a business should run an ad first in order to have a chatbot. Currently, there is an option to use “Message Us” on your Facebook advertising, but that requires that you actually do run ads in the first place. The more ads you run on Facebook, the higher income for Facebook.
As a business owner you have to create a quality chatbot in order to see responses from users. It’s vital to have a good interaction with users through having a well developed user interface(UI).This is why if you decide to have a chatbot, you should develop a bot dialogue messenger in order to get users to become interested in your products or services. I personally recommend using human interaction instead of bots. Because people use different ways in order to communicate with a business and they prefer a human agent to answer their questions. People are not waiting for you to hear your pitch about a product. They are on facebook to interact with their friends and family. This chatbot craze is a new way for Facebook to make money. They could have improved their customer service and have happy users. People are getting tired of Facebook.
According to an article by Bloomberg, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken at Facebook staff meetings about the need to inspire personal sharing. Facebook has tried several tactics to encourage personal sharing. In fact a decline in personal sharing could be a big problem for keeping people highly engaged on the world’s largest social networking website.
Having bots may create confusion and people would not consider your company a serious business. So to avoid spamming via bots, it is better to limit the activities to a point that a customer service agent takes over the conversation and help the company land sales.
Keep focusing on email marketing. Because in email marketing you can be creative and write just about anything and turn a prospect to a customer while a chatbot is more like a communication tool. In digital marketing companies must implement all processes such as: search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click, email marketing, video marketing, RSS feed distribution, social media marketing and mobile marketing in their online marketing campaigns.
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