What is a Facebook Messenger Bot?
The word “bot” is often used to describe software that helps to automate a task. In this particular case, a Facebook Messenger Bot can be used to do a few things such as:
- Automatically reply to visitors who messaged your Facebook page
- Ask questions to provide users with customized information in the form of text, images, videos, and galleries
- Send out updates, reminders, and interactive messages or campaign sequences (similar to email marketing)
- Create automated campaigns and segmenty our subscribes with custom fields and/or tags
- Accept payments from users directly within Messenger (This is currently offered by FB as a limited beta program, not all bots will qualify)
- Notify you (the business owner) or an employee when a visitor or client needs your attention on Messenger
- Give you the ability to interrupt and take over a chat conversation from the bot
The Facebook Messenger Bots do have a few quirks you need to keep in mind though:
- The Bot can only be setup on a Facebook page. It cannot be created on someone’s personal profile or on a group page.
- The majority of Messenger Bots aren’t AI-based and therefore don’t have any natural language processing (NLP). To break this down simply, they can’t understand you like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, or Apple’s Siri.
- You can’t expect to have a full conversation with a Messenger bot because you can’t type in words and expect the bot to understand.
- Messenger Bots are not “chatbots.” In fact, Facebook themselves don’t refer to them as Messenger “Chatbots” either. David Marcus, VP of messaging Product at Facebook, said “We never called them chatbots. We called them bots.”
