Leveraging Facebook Messenger for your business

In the social media marketing world, Facebook is one of the most popular platforms, and deservedly so. But businesses are slowly starting to recognize the importance of Facebook’s messaging platform, and how it can help them make a bigger impact on their customers.

That isn’t really surprising when you consider the fact that Facebook Messenger is one of the biggest messaging platforms in the world, with over 1.3 billion active monthly users. Being a chat platform, Messenger lets you reach a wide range of potential customers initially, and then continue to interact with them on a personal level, depending on the questions they have.

When you use this platform along with traditional networks—like Facebook itself—it can be a potent marketing tool.

How can Messenger help your business?

Marketing

A huge advantage of using Messenger in your marketing is that it can help you drive your audience into having a real conversation with your brand. Using Facebook Click-To-Messenger ads, you can reach a large number of people in your target audience and individually connect with them through the app.

After you set it up, when someone clicks on your ad on Facebook, a chat box with your brand will immediately open up in Messenger. Here, you can create a personalized greeting or a message that will encourage your lead to a chat with your brand.

You can also use Messenger Ads, which help you directly push your ads to the inbox of your target audience. This works similarly to Facebook Ads—only the placement of the ad is changed.

These messenger ads can be set up so that, when your prospective customers click on them, they’ll be taken to your websites homepage or your product page.

Customer Support

You can also use Facebook Messenger to talk to your existing customers and address any questions they may have. This report claims that, by 2019, requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging apps will exceed those through traditional social media. What this means is that consumers will no longer be sending out angry tweets—instead, they’re more likely to directly message you. And, according to Facebook’s own study, a majority of people feel more confident about a brand they can message online.

If your brand has a Facebook page, you can enable your customer support team to answer incoming questions via Messenger. Your customers will also find this more convenient, as they don’t have to spend time on the phone, or go back and forth over emails—they can just shoot you a message and then carry on with their other tasks.

Must-haves on Messenger

Instant replies and greetings

Instant replies and greetings are essential for a business on Messenger. Instant replies, as the name suggests, will immediately send out an automated reply to anyone who messages you. You can personalize what appears, and direct them either to your webpage or to an FAQ page—or you can reply with an expected wait time till you get back to them.

Greeting texts are messages that appear in Messenger as soon as someone opens their chat with you. This text is often customized to provide them with more information about you, the services or products you offer, or a phone number they can call you on.

Messenger Codes

Messenger Codes allow people to connect with your business simply by scanning your code from Messenger. This allows people to directly contact your business from other pages without having to find your Facebook page or search for your brand on Messenger.

You can find your Messenger Code by clicking on the information icon at the bottom of your page inbox. From here, you can download your messenger code as a graphic file and then upload it to your website, share it on other social media networks, or print it on your business cards.

Chatbots

Chatbots are probably the most interesting way your brand can use Messenger. Bots can be used to automate literally anything—like provide weather and traffic updates, or send boarding passes and allow users to change their seating preference, like on KLM.

You can build your chatbot directly through Facebook’s Messenger Platform. However, this requires some software programming. While they do provide you with guides, it can be quite daunting to code a bot from scratch. Luckily, there are a lot of other apps that can help you create your chatbot. Some of the more popular ones are:

• ItsAlive
• ManyChat
• Sequel
• Botsify
• Smooch

It’s no doubt that Facebook Messenger is a game changer. You can now offer personalized customer support, reach your target audience, market and remarket your brand and products to over a billion customers, and you can do it all in one-on-one conversations. If your brand has a page on Facebook, adding Messenger as a marketing tool is a fantastic idea.

Know any Messenger tips we missed? Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll be sure to get in touch!