Broadcasting on FB Messenger. What does it mean to an independent blogger?

Anirban Saha
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read

I’m sure you would not require an introduction to Facebook. Facebook is a social network where people log in to primarily catch up with their friends, unlike other social media networks where people log in for other purposes.

Facebook has also become a market place where every brand, irrespective of their size, makes their presence felt. People are comfortable messaging the brand page for inquiry, complaints or any communication.

Facebook came out with Messenger, the chat application, where a person could either chat one-on-one with their friends or create group and converse. The idea was to be an alternative to WhatsApp or the SMS service the telecom services provide. Today, it is used by more than 1.2 Billion users; of which 400 million uses their audio and video conferencing services. Around 64% of users engage on Messenger on a monthly basis.

Last year, Facebook opened this platform for third party developers to use this to make chatbots. As of April 2017, there are more than 100,000 developers working on 30,000 chatbots deployed in around 200 countries. This is used extensively used by businesses to communicate with the users and collate data.

One of the main features of a basic chat bot, which many tends to not use, is the broadcast service. In this post, I want to talk about how I, as an individual blogger, find value in the FB Messenger Broadcast.

While I am trying to build a broadcasting product myself, in this post, I would like to talk about ManyChat, the chatbot service that I use.

What’s broadcasting? As the name suggests — when you have a message to “broad cast” or send to your users on a mass scale, you use this feature. This broadcast would happen on Facebook Messenger, which a person is more likely to pay attention to, open, read and act.

This is slightly different from sending mass emails which get hidden under “Promotion” or “Updates” tab in Gmail or Google Inbox. Let’s not even talk about the mass SMS. I’m not sure how many of us even care to open them and read. People are so used to broadcasts and random groups on WhatsApp that they are slowly becoming immune. This is where FB Messenger becomes the new vital tool. (This is problem statement 1)

I am a blogger and what’s most important for me is to make more people go to my blog and read the blog posts. I can get my blog traffic from various sources, Google Organic search results primarily. But for conversations to happen, social media traffic is a make or break.

On Facebook, the organic reach is getting restricted. On average, around 2–4 people go to my blog from my page. From my profile and page, which is connected to more than 14,000 people, hardly 10 people click on the link and go to my blog. If I have to boost it, I got around 100+ clicks after spending Rs.300; and as low as 140 clicks for over Rs 550. That’s expensive for a blogger.

For bloggers who do not monetise or are very new, generating numbers on their blog becomes very tough.

Here’s a bit about my audience: This audience was built primarily to showcase my photographs, photo-blogs related to travel and culture written in English. Later, I tried pushing in birding as a part of travel, English articles translated to Bengali and now social media related blog posts. Over a period of time, there’s something for everyone. I try to build an audience by boosting. I get a CTR of 2% inorganically (worst case) to 5.5% inorganically (best case); organically the best I’ve had in the recent past was 5.23%. All screenshots attached below.

Boosted with Rs. 560, spent Rs 515 and 137 people went to the blog.
Spent Rs. 280, got 98 visitors to my blog.
For a post written in vernacular language, Rs. 400 boost led to 314 blog post readers with 3.86% CTR
Travel article for the travel audience with a beautiful preview image. 25 link clicks with 5.23% CTR.
My previous Medium.com article when shared on FB page (8.9K+ Likes), sent 2 people to the blog in 10 hours.

Sharing things on groups, do not really generate traffic either contrary to claims. I’ve also paid popular pages to share my blog links; only to get dismal results.

This is where I trust Broadcast.

I have around 200+ subscribers to the Messenger list. With one broadcast where I do not have to invest money, I get as many as 34 visitors to my blog post.

I did not even invest to build this subscription list. I’ve put a widget on my blog. A couple of visitors keep subscribing everyday from the blog. With the new product that I am trying to build, I believe I can make convert this 200 into 500. Subsequently, the number of clicks on the link would also increase.


The previous Medium.com article when broadcast to 182 people, sent 34 people to the blog in 10 hours.

The Bit.ly link which was broadcast. (4 extra clicks were done by me)
The Goo.gl link of the medium article which was shared on my profile and the page, generated only 8 readers. (2 from Page, 6 from Profile)

Compare 34 link clicks via broadcast with 8 link clicks when I shared the link on the profile and the page. Which one do you think is more effective? Also my wall remains clean.

I need to mention, if you turn greedy, you might send too many broadcasts. That might piss people off and they will not even open your messages.

If you are a blogger or a social media enthusiast, reading this, figure things out, experiment and share with me the results?

If you would like to get in touch with me and help me make the new product that I am planning, drop an email to mailme@anirbansaha.com with a subject line, “Let’s collaborate for the Social Media App”.

If you think, what I’ve told makes sense, then please share this article. You can initiate a private conversation by clicking here.

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Anirban Saha

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I plan to write my thoughts about social media and analytics on medium.com. My main photo-blog would always be www.anirbansaha.com.

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