Messenger changes and how to deal with them.
If you’re into Messenger Marketing then you probably already know that some things changed starting from July 31st, with even more changes finally taking place on August 15th.
Since we’ve put out our Messenger Bot Giveaways, and the Milestone Referral for Messenger templates, it’s evident that these changes would impact some of our users as well.
This article is an attempt to list the changes in Facebook Messenger, and how you can overcome everything that looks like an obstacle for you.
As expected, I will also emphasize on the workarounds for the changes that have a direct impact on our users.
Spoiler Alert: They are not that many.
Let’s see the changes.
The Share Buttons are removed.
That’s truly a pity.
The share button was a quick way for users to share something with their friends.
Up until now, you could add a share button on a card, and the end-user had to click that share button and would forward the message to another contact.
It looked something like this:
If you’re running a referral marketing campaign, making it easy for users to share about the campaign is crucial.
The good news is that even without the share button, there’s a workaround for allowing people to share about your referral marketing campaigns inside messenger, and it comes to build in our templates.
Instead of using a sharing button, users will have to forward the message to their friends. All they have to do is:
1. Press the forward button next to the card,
2. Then type or select a contact’s name.
3. Hit “Send”
Problem solved!
Messenger Codes are not working anymore.
This is something that we’ve seen coming for a long time now.
Starting August 15, the Messenger camera will no longer support scanning Messenger Codes.
If you liked using Messenger codes, the only viable solution right now is good ol’ QR codes.
We liked them a lot. These scan codes helped one of our clients to gain 35K leads in 20 days.
Scan codes worked perfectly for brick and mortar businesses.
For this reason, Manychat prepared a QR Code generator for you to use for your campaigns. They have replaced the current Facebook Messenger code so that all of your existing templates and campaigns which consist of Facebook Messenger Code work the same as before, but with a QR code instead.
They haven’t changed the current name of the Growth Tool, so you will still see it as a Facebook Messenger code.
Messaging Policy.
Up till now, you could send a broadcast to all of your subscribers at any time. Facebook always decided what’s “OK” and what is “not OK” in terms of what and when businesses can send to their subscribers.
As of right now, this is Facebook’s messaging policy:
- Standard Messaging (24+1): You can send promotional and non-promotional messages to users that have interacted with your Messenger bot in the past 24 hours plus an additional message after 24 hours.
- Message Tags: If you want to send messages after the 24+1 window, you can do so if your message falls under the eligible use cases of the 17 different Message Tags provided by Facebook. These messages can’t be promotional.
- Sponsored Messages: If you want to send promotional messages after the 24+1 window, you should use Sponsored Messages.
The tag that you’ll probably be more interested in (if you’re using Messenger to send content to your subscribers) is called NON_PROMOTIONAL_SUBSCRIPTION, and it allows your page to send messages for the use cases of News, Productivity, and Personal Tracking.
To have access to this tag, your page needs to have Page Level Subscription Permission, for which you had to apply up until July, 31st 2019.
If you already have a Page-level Subscription Permission, you will be able to continue using broadcasts as before without any interruption.
If you do not have Page Level Subscription Permissions, and you believe that your Page falls under one of the use cases of Subscription Messaging, then your Page can apply to get a Page-level Subscription Permission.
Bye, Bye Vertical Lists.
The design feature of your lists being vertical will be changed to horizontal.
This is a positive design change as a vertical list pushes the message up and makes it hard to read everything on mobile.
A horizontal list will appear as a scrollable carousel allowing the user to see the full message and scroll through your list from left to right.
Your existing vertical lists will be transformed into the new horizontal format.
We already take advantage of the horizontal format in our Milestone referral template for Messenger.
Nested Menus no more.
From August 15, 2019, and on, Nested Menus (a.k.a. The persistent menu) will cease to exist and will be replaced by a single layer menu format.
Officially Published @ Viral Loops Blog
