Step by Step guide to setting up a Facebook messenger bot
Not using a chatbot as part of your marketing? Well maybe now is the time to start?
OK so you get the concept, a chatbot is a program that interacts with those engaging with your brand, either in on the website or through Social Media, it's all good for customer service but what can it do for marketing?
From a marketers perspective Chatbots excel in 3 core areas
- Engagement
- Qualifying sales
- Creating a personal customer experience
Let's start with personalising your marketing, creating a personal customer experience is a sure fire way to gaining repeat business and inspiring loyalty. You can qualify sales (you can even add it to your CRM with a few workarounds) Engagement obviously crucially important on every level for marketing but where Facebook is concerned using the comments bot to trigger your bot with a call to action can actually increase the reach and shelf life of your post! (yup, organic reach)
Let's get started
You now have a lot of choice when it comes to chatbots, working across all platforms and websites. Some chatbots can even learn from the requests that are received and build insight and intelligence on your customer base (wow) As you’re here I am guessing you are looking for something a little less complex to begin with. For this tutorial we are going to look at Facebook messenger as many of you have significant pages and groups that can take advantage of a chatbot. The system we are going to use is ManyChat, plenty of great chatbot tools around, we have used this one and found it really easy to use with loads of resource available to help.
In part one of this tutorial we will look at how to setup a basic Facebook messenger bot using ManyChat, this will get you ready for part 2 where we will show you some exciting ways of using your bot, first though you need to set one up!
You will next be taken to the screen to log in with Facebook so ManyChat can access your account and your pages, the system will not post to your account.
The default setting request access to your public profile and email, you are able to remove the email however the public profile is clearly required.
You next need to confirm the level of access to your messages, we had no issue with the requested access and clicked continue. You will then see a list of the pages you manage, simply select the pages you want to link up with ManyChat and proceed to the on-boarding.
Just make sure that you uncheck the the subscribe box (unless you want to subscribe) this is a good example though of best practice, when you are looking to build a list you need to give people a clear opt out option. Especially given the GDPR regulation coming in may 2018 when collecting data from consumers (B2B have a few mixed views)
Next you will need to select a welcome message for subscribers, this will require an image and text. You have 640 characters for your welcome message and the image will need to be at least 262 X 211 px, to be honest I dragged and dropped a standard size social media image I created and it seemed to work.
Your message is a chance to add a bit of personality to your bot, and again give good housekeeping letting people know how to unsubscribe, take some time to think about this as it's an extension of your brand! (mine is only an example)
Not only is this an extension of your brand but with open rates of between 60-100% it is a great way to get your message seen by your customers. It's worth remembering that this is still a personal space for many and first impressions count, so really think about your message and how it represents your brand.
Next you will be asked to do a broadcast, you will not have any list to send to so it will just be sent to you, a few options exist for the layout however it is simple enough to add images and text boxes etc.
You do have the option of skipping these steps, however it is good if you have not used a chatbot before to practice and get familiar with how things will display on desktop and mobile.
Once that is done you have some options to share your bot, we use this step to test it works sending a link to subscribe to a bot is not exactly inspiring, but it is useful solely for the testing stage, double check it works!
Congratulations, you now have your bot! Next step is to put it to work, you will now have access to the dashboard take some time to get familiar with the controls, here, you have many options.
Keep a look out for part 2 “how to use your bot to answers Facebook comments” This will help drive reach and increase engagement. We will go into more depth about how we used this simple chat bot to drive engagement during a livestream and we will look at other examples of how to creatively use bots for marketing.
You can also catch the replay of the livestream below, in part 2 of this series we will show you how we set "Tiny" up to distribute our research report which you can download here:
Stuart also appeared on the JSB podcast giving a case study on how we used chatbots for marketing, listen below.