Facebook Bots for fun and profit

Facebook now allows bots to talk to users. The bots are fun to interact with and not too hard to setup. After using a few good ones, you will want your own bot for fun and profit!

The ‘bot’ is a computer program running in the background that can respond to messages on the Facebook Messenger platform. The bot can be for personal or business use. I’ve used several of them recently and I’m confident that everyone will want their own bot assistant. I see the rise of the bots as the next evolution of the website, app or Facebook page. The bot is a new way to communicate with the people that you care about.

The bot excels in a ‘structured’ conversation. A structured conversation is one where the computer leads the user by giving options at every point. The user can mostly click there way through rather than typing. Bots can respond to typed keywords and general text as well but that gets more complicated. I’ll focus on building a simple structured conversation bot for this article.

Esther Crawford gave a great introduction and example of her resume in this article.

Exploring

Esther’s article motivated me to try creating a bot of my own. I twiddled with Smooch and cross platform messaging but eventually decided to focus on Facebook as a primary platform.

It turns out that writing a FB robot is quite simple for an experienced programmer and certainly within reach of the hobbyist. Facebook has a good example and decent documentation. Along with a Heroku account, it took me about an hour to setup a basic simple bot.

I’ve refined the basic example into a simple bot that anyone can setup and run. The robot is running here.

The bot gives information about Facebook bot basics and my consulting company. Just for fun, it also tells jokes. The Facebook bot framework is very configurable so your bot can be completely different from mine with no programming changes.

Facebook allows a variety of widgets in the Messenger windows including buttons, post backs, images, audio, video, text, and a pop up menu. One bot will similar to another but the content is completely up to you.

Customizing a bot will take some programming effort. The joke functionality of DMS Software bot is an example of a custom interaction. There is some (simple) JavaScript that drives the joke functionality that will not be available generally.

We can help

If you are excited about creating a custom bot to market yourself or your business, send me a message via my Bot or see the DMS Software website DMS Software

Creating your own Facebook Bot!

If you want to make your own bot, the simplest strategy will be to create a Github account and ‘fork’ my example. Once you have the source follow the detailed instructions in the README.md.

There are some technical details but it is not too bad so dig in even if you are not a professional developer. Getting your bot up and running is just a matter of establishing a Heroku account and adding your credentials from Facebook. Once your bot up and going, you can edit the text, add your own images, change the flow around, etc. No programming is required.

Talk to the world

The bot is the next wave in communication. Soon the bots will be an indispensable part of our daily interaction for both personal and business use. With something like 900 million people on Facebook, your bot can talk to the world!

If you have questions or technical problems, comment on this article or send me a message on my Bot.

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Enjoy your bot journey!