When Social Media Bots Become The Norm

Facebook Messenger’s Answer To Email Is Too Good To Ignore

Cosmotribe
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Up until late April of 2017, Facebook’s slightly less used App, Messenger has been in large part, undervalued. It was used casually and not very often.

It was initially launched as a side app to help filter out incoming and outgoing messages into our Facebook accounts.

Beyond that Facebook was struggling to find a viable solution to keeping Messenger relevent long term.

In April of 2017, at the annual Facebook conference, F8, the company officially announced a new direction for the Messenger App — a direction you’re all going to like.

A few years ago we used to hear all about how content is king, but things changed.


The firehose of information being created by humans on Social media has exponentially increased to the point where it’s not even worth trying to keep up with it because it’s only going to get bigger the more people come online.

We each only have 24 hours in a day so what are we supposed to do to scale our efforts in talking to more people at once?

Remember, we EACH have 24 hours in a day.

When automation and artificial intelligence meet

At the same conference in April 2017, Facebook announced that it would allow developers from all over the world to create and upload chat robots to the Facebook network.

Kind of like how Apple allows Apps to be uploaded to the Apple store and downloaded by millions.

Big brands like Domino’s, CNN, and even L’Oreal jumped on the chat bot band wagon and now you can too.

I won’t beat around the bush — it’s amazing.

Introducing ManyChat

You see, while big businesses built their chat bots, small tech start ups created chat bot programs that you can run off your computer where you set up your own Facebook page chat bot in under 10 minutes.

You can create canned responses for a multitude of different questions or requests you might receive.

If you think most people will contact you through your page to ask you to book an appointment or inquire about prices, you can set keywords for each one of those words.

When someone messages you and asks “What are your prices like?” , the bot recognizes the word “price” and then (because you set it up) opens up a website link with your price list (if you have them posted).

If someone messages and use the word “appointment” or any other word you set up like “appt” , the bot will urge them to press a button where they’re taken off Facebook to your booking page.

A-MAAAAAZING!

As you know, I’m a huge fan of upgrades on social media that benefit your business on there considering I still message each one of my social media “followers” by hand to thank them for their attention.

The photo above shows you inside the ManyChat website.

It’s so easy to set-up.

This tool is so good, it’s everything Facebook was missing on Messenger.

I already like it better than e-mail.

There are a ton of bots you can choose to create your templates for your messages that can deliver LARGE amounts of messages as the same time — like e-mail but here’s the one everyone’s raving about: ManyChat.

This option to create automated messages and create messaging sequences on Facebook is a time saver.

You can take bookings, sell education classes or show your audience your how-to videos on Youtube.

Facebook Messenger is finally worth using!

The main catch is, no matter what you do, whether you pay for Ads or not, you can only ever sell to the fans of your page that have been active in the last 24hours.

Facebook itself, not the bot Manychat, is set up in a way where Facebook wants you to provide ongoing value in your messages and serve your audience with useful information rather than push non-stop discount offers.

In my next blog, I will report back with tips on how to properly use ManyChat so you can automate your Facebook Messenger Marketing in a few days.

I’ll also show you what kind of response and engagement we’ll be getting from our 3,500 page fans ;)

Talk soon.

Melissa.

P.S. If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to message me directly on Facebook at m.me/hairstylisttribe . You’ll get to see our chat bot in action ;)

P.P.S. It’s only been up and running a few hours. We’re testing and tweaking daily.

Cosmotribe

Written by

We help beauty professionals & salon owners grow their clientele. 🥉Order our social selling book: bit.ly/bcflamazon

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade