Most brands don’t have the resources to offer 24/7 online customer service and sales support on Facebook Messenger, let alone on their website. Fortunately, chatbots don’t need to sleep or eat. Facebook Messenger bots can answer customer questions, track packages, make product recommendations, and even close a sale 24/7. This makes it great for building customer relationships across the globe and across different set time zones.
Let's uncover how to make a Messenger chatbot, give tips on using Facebook Messenger, and how Messenger and Facebook alike can boost your marketing and sales goals.
Table of Contents
- Why Build a Chatbot for Facebook?
- Building a Bot for Your Business
- Steps to Set Up a Bot for Messenger in Facebook
- Choosing a Chatbot Software Builder
- What's Next?
Why Build a Chatbot for Facebook
Facebook is the most-used social media platform in the world, according to research found by Hootsuite. If you already have a shop set up on Facebook, you’ve taken the right step to join an ever-growing online marketplace. That's because in 2020, there was almost a 4% increase in online shopping. And that number is only rising.
A Facebook Shop is an online store that lives on Facebook and Instagram and allows users to browse, shop, and make purchases either directly on Facebook or by clicking through to a company’s website to complete the sale.
Facebook and Instagram users can find businesses on Facebook Shop via a Facebook page or an Instagram profile.
What’s cool about Facebook Shops is that the feature can be found organically or through ads, meaning there are lots of opportunities for social media marketers to optimize businesses for both channels. With a Facebook shop, you can have people shop online and even check out from their cart like a regular ecommerce site. What's this have to do with a chatbot for your Messenger on your Facebook page? You can connect this shop to it easily.
Find out how to use Facebook Messenger bots, which we'll call Facebook chatbots in this article, for customer service and social commerce below. Create a streamlined experience for your customer and followers, and stand out from your competition. Other media outlets and webpages you've created can also be connected to your Messenger bot, so let's learn more about these chatbots.
About Facebook Messenger Bots
A chatbot is a piece of automated messaging software that uses artificial intelligence to converse with people. Chat and messaging are the most used types of apps and websites out there, so it's no surprise businesses have started to build chatbots and engage in more social messaging platforms to connect with people and garner leads and customers.
Facebook Messenger bots live within Facebook Messenger, and can converse with some of the 1.3 billion people who use Facebook Messenger every month.
Chatbots are like virtual assistants. They can be programmed to understand questions, provide answers, and execute tasks. They can provide a customized online shopping experience and even make sales. Even on Facebook!
How Businesses Use a Facebook Messenger Chatbot
According to Hootsuite, people spend an average of 3 hours every month using Facebook Messenger, which means it is the third largest used social app out there. Whatsapp, of course, and Facebook are the other two largest.
69% of people say if they can message a business or brand on a social media site, they feel more confident in the business and see it as more legitimate. So, how do businesses use chat to build a customer base through Facebook?
They use their chatbot on Messenger to follow through with day-to-day customer service questions or FAQs and other common duties that a regular chatbot would do, such as:
- Hyperlinking business webpages to redirect visitors
- Helping customers with orders
- Tracking purchase shipments
- Scheduling appointments
- Suggest products, gifts, and more!
Now, how do business get people to use their Facebook Messenger chatbot to begin with? And how do they get people interested in their products using the chatbot? There are a few tactics other than simply having it on their Facebook page. They can use:
- Facebook Messenger ads
- Downloadable free content offered in the Facebook chatbot
- Offer deals for new customers only
Businesses also use chatbots on their Facebook page to collect potential lead and customer information to send future marketing campaigns. This means you are able to build a form within your message on your bot.
Building a Bot for Your Business
Let's guide you on how to build a chatbot for Facebook Messenger. Building a bot for social media messaging apps isn't too different from building a bot for your website, for example. However, there are a few things to keep in mind since you are building chatbots for oftentimes a different demographic, target audience, or brand message to attract that other target audience.
Remember: As your bot greets potential customers, it can identify their needs, ask basic questions, provide inspiration, and direct high-quality leads to your human sales team. Sounds easy to build, right? Not unlike a regular chatbot. There are, though, two different ways to build a bot based on the two most common types of businesses.
Build Ecommerce Chatbots
Chatbots for ecommerce will need different personalization than other types of businesses. You can still create these chatbots quickly, but it's important to remember a few things that you need for online shoppers.
The average customer will want to get chatbots that:
Show Tracking Information
Customers need tracking if you ship out products to them. Whether it is clothing, car parts that you sell to a company, or furniture deliveries, the first step to keep a customer happy is knowing they can track the progress in their purchase.
Show Personal Purchase History
This category can mean a lot of things. Maybe the customer wants to interact with your brand on social channels to see products (to see possibly prices of products they may have bought or are thinking of buying), or perhaps they simply want to know how much they've purchased in the past.
A few other things they may need include purchase confirmation number or order number, ability to cancel a purchase before it ship out, and starting a return.
All of these options need to have an email confirmation sent to the customer. These are blocks that you can easily add to your chatbot with the right email automation software linked to the bot.
Remember that you will usually have to text asking people for their email address or account name with your company in order to know who your chatbot is talking to and where to send any confirmation of a return, purchase, etc.
Offer Survey
Okay, honestly, not every customer will care to get this offer to fill out a survey at the end of the bot conversation. But it is important for your marketing needs and business brand to see if you can improve something in any way. See what is working and why some people may be unhappy.
In fact, you may be surprised how many bot users want to give input if they enjoyed the conversation or found it helpful. And they will want improvement, too, if they needed the bot to get them more solutions.
Create a Chatbot for Contractors
Contractors may occasionally need a block in their chatbots that ecommerce businesses need. However, there are likely a few other things that businesses providing a service should consider when building a bot or talking to chatbot builders who create customized chatbots for businesses.
Booking
Let's say you have a bed and breakfast and need to be able to book visitors for particular rooms. You can build a bot that takes visitors to a page specifically with available dates and times and even rooms they can choose to stay in!
Wouldn't it be nice if those customers can get immediate booking for the room they choose all from the chatbot on your website or Facebook Messenger? They can! You can do this by putting a block or form directly in your chatbot on your Facebook Messenger or site. you can also redirect visitors to a page on your website or third party booking site to complete the room booking.
Scheduling
If you have a service for tailoring, hair cutting, or other spa services, scheduling to work with a potential client or current customer is vital. Returning customers and leads appreciate being able to schedule a time to see you.
And it's even easier if they can do this through a chatbot. It's easy to put in a form or third party page to your bot in order for clients to schedule a time that is open. You can also ensure that your calendar is connected to the chatbot in order to not accidentally double book clients.
Steps to Set Up a Bot for Messenger in Facebook
Let's uncover what it takes to set up a bot step by step. The first two steps are the basic things every type of business needs to do via Facebook, then we can dive deeper into integrating a TruVISIBILITY chatbot to your Facebook Messenger app.
1) Create a Facebook Business Page
Creating a social page for your business is vital. This business page on Facebook should be separate from your personal Facebook account. The business owner can name themselves an admin of the page, but the business owner shouldn't have their business as their personal Facebook page. Yes, even contractors and services should have a separate page.
2) Decide What Your Visitors Need from a Bot
Block out a time of day where you can visit competitor sites and interact with a chatbot or two. See what content, conversations, or answer to any question they provide.
You can get inspiration from this or simply take some of the text into your own chatbot build if it fits your business and brand. Just make sure it is indeed what your own users will need. Ask yourself:
- Do visitors need to add products to their orders often?
- Should my business provide a fun or cute experience or a simple straightforward question and answer chatbot?
- How often should visitors reply with their own text instead of clicking "yes" or "no" buttons?
- How many minutes do visitors generally have a conversation with your chatbot before abandoning an unresolved experience?
Keep in mind that a lot of these questions may be related to support or FAQs. However, you can learn about what works in your chatbot by A/B testing and planting optional surveys for your users to take after having a conversation with your bot.
3) Build the Bot
We will show you how to start creating a message chatbot for Facebook using TruVISIBILITY's Chat platform.
1. Log into your Facebook account and go to the Facebook Developer Console.
2. Go to the “My Apps” tab.
3. Click on “Create App” and choose an app type. Then click “Next”.
4. Enter an app name and contact email address. After that, click “Create app”.
5. On the next page, click the “Set up” button for the Messenger option.
6. In the Access Tokens section, click on the “Add or remove Pages” button to choose one of your Facebook pages or click “Create new Page” to create a new page first.
7. Once you have linked your app to Facebook, click on the “Generate Token” button in the Access Tokens section.
8. Check the box “I Understand” and copy Page Access Token. Keep this token handy, as you'll need to enter it in Chat.
Building a Bot for Facebook Messenger
1. In Chat, go to the Chat Widgets tab.
2. Select a chat widget you need and click on it.
3. Go to the Channels tab.
4. Click the “Connect” button in the Facebook Messenger section.
5. Paste the Access Token into the related field, click “Save”.
Choosing a Chatbot Software Builder
What's the best chatbot software builder? Let's go over the best option for bot building for all your marketing Facebook Messenger needs.
Chatfuel
Chatfuel boasts about letting clients use their chatbot messenger app to reply to leads and customer on Facebook, Instagram, and more, such as chatbots deployed on client websites.
Like most software offering to create chatbots, Chatfuel offers great template choices in different business types, such as restaurants, ecommerce businesses, real estate, healthcare, and more.
To automate on your own, building a chatbot and deploying it on Facebook, for example, it will cost almost $12 a month. Larger enterprises will have to pay upwards of $200 per month.
TruVISIBILITY
TruVISIBILITY offers to create a bot for you, but you can create a chatbot on your own to place anywhere the software allows you, including Facebook!
The simple drag and drop options allow you to use the builder to place blocks of different content in your chatbot, such as a form, and drag the response to any possible question your users may have. With one click, you can also deploy your chatbot to your website if using TruVISIBILITY for more than messages, such as building your own website.
You can check out the page for Chat here. The content included in each works seamlessly with automation messages to connect with leads and customers quicker. Take a minute to check out the Messages app as well.
Unlike Chatfuel, you can use this software for free, and it only take two minutes to sign up. For a more customized experience (or if you have a larger business), pricing is customizable and still very affordable compared to any other chatbot builder on the market that promises to do the same automation conversation marketing.
What's Next?
Now that you know how most businesses use chatbots for Facebook Messenger, you can start to build your own! Don't forget to create a bot that matches your social media and business goals. They can be one in the same sometimes. And you can create more than one linear conversation to help boost your business sales and visibility.
Speaking of visibility, the chatbots you can make on TruVISIBILITY's Chat app can be integrated with your Facebook Messenger. TruVISIBILITY even show you how to create a bot easily with drag and drop features for your Facebook business page.
Yes, having a Facebook page and building a Messenger chatbot are part of social media marketing, but it's arguably the most important type of marketing depending on the type of business and brand image you create. Meaning: If you want to attract younger audiences, building a bot for Messenger is almost a must to generate those extra leads who wouldn't necessarily find you organically through a Google search.
Don't be afraid of writing dialogue blocks and creating extra support for the right audience you want. Hopefully, you've found this guide on getting started with Facebook Messenger marketing and building a Facebook Messenger bot enlightening. It's not so hard to make a bot, so start building now and you can have a functional chatbot done by the end of the day!
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow