3 ways to launch your news chatbot
Just look at media giants conquering messaging apps in addition to social networks. CNN, Huffington Post, The Telegraph and Washington Post have already covered all messaging apps their audience use. But how to reach several new channels for news distribution at once and with minimal efforts and at a minimum cost?
If you are reading this article, you have already considered creating and launching chatbots for your newspaper or blog. Where to start? Whom to hire? Who will administer the whole thing in future?
Everybody who gets into messenger marketing and wants to implement it asks these questions in the first place.
These are the first questions for people who get into messenger marketing and want to implement it.
In this article, we decided to investigate advantages and drawbacks of several ways of creation and launch of a chatbot for a content resource, be in an online media company or a usual blog on the social network.
You can create a bot from scratch on your own or hire experts to do it
Most large publishers have an in-house development team. But it is not always reasonable to entrust this task to regular developers. Before they start working on the chatbot, the team which previously worked on the production system, website and, at best, apps, will need to go through hundreds of pages of documentation.
Messenger marketing is heating up at a frantic pace. While in-house developers are coding a simple bot according to the Technical Specification, messaging platforms will roll out another update and it will go in circles. It is possible that in future you will have to appoint a separate developer to maintain and optimize your chatbot.
And it’s even worse if your company doesn’t have enough productive resources. Anyway, you always can hire a contractor company with expertise in this field.
Everything seems to be easy and fun with custom development:
- you don’t waste time and resources;
- you get all the functionality you can imagine and any possible on a given messaging app UI design;
- your bot is unique and developed considering the peculiarities of your company and content;
But you will encounter such drawbacks:
- a high price; if you order a chatbot from a more or less experienced company, it will cost at least $2000;
- you will have to pay an additional fee to connect your bot to each additional channel (messaging platform); as a rule, it is about 50% of the initial price;
- creation of the Technical Specification and development can take quite a long time;
- technical support conditions depend on the contract, and you have to pay for each new feature.
Sounds all right to you? Let’s move on
You can use constructors and create a bot on your own
There are plenty of development platforms and with each day, their number grows. You don’t need coding skills to create a bot on them. Most of them have a trial version or even free plans with limited functionality. It is a tangible benefit indeed.
But on the other hand:
- You will waste your time understanding an interface and working principle of the chosen constructor. Note, that it’s not every platform that has intuitive interface and will be easy to use for a creative person not very good at tech;
- Most of the bot-building platforms allow developing a bot for one or two messaging apps only. What about Viber, WhatsApp, Line, Skype, Slack and other? Outsourcing again?
- In most cases, tech support is not available for free plans. Your only hope is FAQ and community. But even with paid plan, you will get the answer only the following day;
- The services are mostly targeted at e-commerce, management and sometimes for content distribution but no one aimed to optimize admin panel to suit online newspapers with often up to 5 hundred of messages of the content per day. 5–10 latest news from the general RSS-feed cannot satisfy reader’s need to get a full picture of the day.You will waste your time understanding an interface and working principle of the chosen constructor. Note, that it’s not every platform that has intuitive interface and will be easy to use for a creative person not very good at tech
On the whole, these services can be used to try creating a chatbot, test this technology and evaluate perspectives.
Read also: 20 News Bots to every taste
You can use a content management system on messengers for publishers
A couple of years ago, social network content services gained popularity in the market. SMM specialists began to use Hootsuite, Buffer and similar apps to manage several accounts in different social networks from one place: set up auto-posting, schedule publications and analyze them in details. Now, each internet marketer has chosen a similar system for his or her work and cannot imagine a life without it.
Now, everyone needs such instruments to manage accounts on messaging apps. Just look at media giants conquering messaging apps in addition to social networks. CNN, Huffington Post, The Telegraph and Washington Post have already covered all messaging apps their audience use.
But how to reach several new channels for news distribution at once and with minimal efforts and at a minimum cost? Asking ourselves this question, we began developing PublyBot — a system for content distribution on messaging apps for publishers.
Today, PablyBot combines the functions of usual chatbot constructors and classical content management system for publishers.
Its principal advantage is the fact that it is a tool optimized for its niche. It is developed considering the requirements of content resources and it has an extensive setup system for content personalization.
There are some more advantages:
- an easy and fast setup — you really can launch a bot in 5 minutes after you decide to do so;
- there is an automatic import of content from various sources: RSS/Atom/social media feed;
- monthly payment mechanism spares you from investing a considerable amount of money without evaluation of results and the potential of this innovation;
And the best thing, you can manage an unlimited number of chatbots on different messaging apps from one admin panel. In most cases, one chatbot won’t be sufficient for a large online edition — everyday digests, weekly digests, real-time breaking news; bot politicians, bot technologists, and bot synoptics. There are plenty of ideas, you have just to fulfill them.
Right now PublyBot works with Facebook Messenger, Viber, and Telegram. Soon, Skype, Slack, Line and others will be also available.
And there are some drawbacks:
- some of PublyBot functions claimed on a website are at the development stage but it doesn’t keep publishers from connecting to the service today and start gathering subscribers.
You can read about the functionality of PublyBot in details on the website of the product https://publybot.com / or contact us https://www.messenger.com/t/publybot.
