Jonathan Adams (Chief Digital Officer, Americas) & Phaedra Poulimenou (Performance Account Manager, UK)
This will allow brands to directly interact with consumers without them leaving the Facebook Messenger chat environment – potentially creating an entirely new customer service and communication outlet for brands.
Maxus discusses why now is a good time for reappraisal of the Messenger ecosystem for marketers … as part of our Change Briefing series.
What’s Changed?
What’s changed at Facebook? A lot… at least for marketers.
It’s been hard to miss that Facebook held it’s developer’s conference in San Francisco this week — where they announced several new and important product updates.
Some of these announcements are fairly substantial – including the introduction of bots for the globally popular Facebook Messenger. This will allow brands to directly interact with consumers without them leaving the Facebook Messenger chat environment – potentially creating an entirely new customer service and communication outlet for brands. …This may be as big a deal as when Apple launched its App Store; time will tell, of course.
- Messenger vs. Facebook. In fact, when Facebook made the decision to separate the messaging features from its core Facebook app, it was clear that they had ambitious longer term plans for the platform, beyond its primary function of connecting “friends”. With more than 900M interactions globally every month, the focus is now shifting to connecting people with brands to create more engaging experiences, and in doing, monetize the massive user base that messenger has developed. The partnership with Uber late last year that allowed users to book a taxi through the messenger app was an early indicator of this approach by Facebook.
- Messenger v. Browser. At F8 this week, Facebook released a new set of APIs which brands will be able to leverage to build intelligent ‘chatbots’ within the Facebook Messenger environment. These bots will provide people with tailored messaging from automated on-demand content like delivering top news stories, to customized communications like itineraries and gift ideas using text, images, links and calls to action.
What the Change Means
In recent months, key messenger platform players, such as Kik, have also begun testing bots within messenger environments – so this Facebook announcement is not completely surprising. However, Facebook is releasing much greater depth into this market (all at once) than any of their competitors have to date. This depth is particularly interesting – and helps put the “messenger bot” squarely in the headlines this week and potentially in marketing plans within the year ahead.
Some of the advances in the messaging platform are worthy of a moment’s analysis:
- Bots for Messenger Platform. Facebook’s new bots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather or traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages. At launch this week, they shared a “breaking news” bot from CNN, a weather bot from Poncho, and an eCommerce shopping bot from Spring.
- Messenger Send/Receive API. Powering bots themselves are a new set of APIs that allow brands to create a wide variety of experiences. Businesses leveraging these new APIs will be able to send text, video and images to customers as well as new message bubbles that feature dynamic content (like shipping updates and receipts) and custom call-to-action buttons. Businesses will also be able to receive text and images from consumers – and maintain a record of a full thread history (including previous conversations) and also trigger events from CTA buttons (like canceling a reservation or upgrading a hotel room). This will be helped greatly by the wit.ai Bot Engine.
- Wit.ai Bot Engine. We are particularly excited by the Wit.ai Bot Engine, which can allow bots to manage common conversations dynamically (vs via a fixed decision-tree structure). Businesses will be able to “train” the bot on how to address common questions, freeing up customer service reps to tackle their most complex/challenging needs. The future in many ways is here…
Implications of the Change for Advertisers
This new means of interactive communication between brands and people will help advertisers gain more insight in to what their customers want and need and through this functionality within Messenger, and the ability to automatically directly respond to that live.
- ‘Likes’ are so 2015. As we move away from Likes and Comments as success metrics within advertising on social platforms, through Facebook Messenger brands will have the opportunity to truly understand what their audiences ‘like’ enabling personalised 1 to 1 marketing at scale.
- Still early days. Even though it is still early days, the arrival of Facebook bots within Messenger has the potential to evolve and influence the way we consume media and interact with brands considerably. The challenge for brands will be to ensure these bots are not intrusive – but rather useful, timely and welcome communications with people who have opted-in. After all, this is an even more personal space than your Facebook newsfeed. Given their experience at carefully massaging the newsfeed format – we expect that Facebook has the potential to make this move a game changer for brands and indeed for people.
- Focus on the core 5. The majority of consumers spend most of their time in just five apps each month, and if/when the technology development within these bots can enable anything from humanized customer support to personalized concierge services in a more tailored and personal way, it becomes apparent that people are increasingly less likely to install a new app for every brand that they interact with. Therefore a brand’s route to consumer should be focused on the opportunities within those core apps… with continued careful consideration of security/privacy as well as getting the communication style right for each environment.
- Ai. only makes it better. While these platforms are well suited to the same type of tasks which IVR (interactive voice recording) systems manage today – they will likely become much better, very quickly. Facebook’s ambition is to use artificial intelligence (Ai.) allowing the bots to learn your preferences over time, interpret intent and eventually complete tasks for you. That is quite some change to consider.
